Does Python need a '>>>' operator?

[Martin v. Loewis]

David Eppstein <eppstein at ics.uci.edu> writes:

> > Yes, but this notion is inherently bound with the notion of "size" of
> > an integer, atleast in the signed variant (for unsigned integers,
> > there is no need for twos complement). If you create the complement,
> > you have to know how many bits to invert.
> 
> Not if you have a representation which (when interpreted as a bitvector) 
> allows bitvectors with infinitely many one-bits.  Which in fact is what 
> we have with Python's long integer type.

Unfortunately, you cannot represent such a number in hex, atleast not
under any of the usual conventions: the convention is that you can
strip infinitely many leading zeroes, but stripping off infinitely many
leading ones is confusing.

Regards,
Martin