Getting rid of bitwise operators in Python 3?

[Paul Rubin]

richyjsm at gmail.com writes:
> And who is it who uses this functionality? 

I use it but I agree it's easy to implement given the underlying
bignum arithmetic.

> It's useful in elementary number theory, sure, but I'd argue that if
> there are going to be number theoretical functions in the core then
> there are other things, like gcd(), that are far more deserving of
> inclusion.  

Certainly xgcd should be in the math library or somewhere similar.

> It comes up in the RSA cryptosystem, but if you're using
> Python's pow for this then you're surely only writing a toy RSA
> implementation, perhaps for educational purposes(?).  

Not necessarily.  See for example http://trevp.net/tlslite