SRFI 142: Bitwise Operations

by John Cowan

status: withdrawn (2017-08-10)

Abstract

This SRFI proposes a coherent and comprehensive set of procedures for performing bitwise logical operations on integers; it is accompanied by a reference implementation of the spec in terms of a set of seven core operators. The sample implementation is portable, as efficient as practical with pure Scheme arithmetic (it is worthwhile replacing the core operators with C or assembly language if possible), and open source.

The precise semantics of these operators is almost never an issue. A consistent, portable set of names and parameter conventions, however, is. Hence this SRFI, which is based mainly on SRFI 33, with some changes and additions from Olin's late revisions to SRFI 33 (which were never consummated). SRFI 60 (based on SLIB) is smaller but has a few procedures of its own; some of its procedures have both native (often Common Lisp) and SRFI 33 names. They have been incorporated into this SRFI. R6RS is a subset of SRFI 60, except that all procedure names begin with a bitwise- prefix. A few procedures have been added from the general vector SRFI 133.

Among the applications of bitwise operations are: hashing, Galois-field calculations of error-detecting and error-correcting codes, cryptography and ciphers, pseudo-random number generation, register-transfer-level modeling of digital logic designs, Fast-Fourier transforms, packing and unpacking numbers in persistent data structures, space-filling curves with applications to dimension reduction and sparse multi-dimensional database indexes, and generating approximate seed values for root-finders and transcendental function algorithms.