Paolo Bonzini a écrit :
> 
>>> It is possible to work out bitwise ops on magnitude representation, 
>>> by computing the two's complement representation on the fly in the 
>>> primitives or in the fallback Smalltalk code.
>>
>> OK, another - better - way to go: should be much less work than 
>> changing the representation.
> 
> That's exactly what nicolas's patch in mantis does.
> 
> Paolo
> 
> 

Oh, I did not that much!
All this arithmetic stuff simulating two complement was already there 
for a long time in Squeak, bit logic was handled correctly in most cases.

My contribution is limited to finding a flaw in implementation in some 
very rare conditions.

Thread title was a little provocation, because i think the feature is 
rarely used, except accidentally. It was to eventually get an echo 
proving me wrong.

In fact it is used very often via hash, since -3 hash = -3, and a lot of 
bit logic is performed on hash codes, but:
1) a bug leading to a different hash would not matter
    (as long as it does not lead systematically to a single hash code)
2) most hash should involve SmallInteger, not large ones.

Anyway, we cannot blame squeak for taking the hard path.
Some smalltalk dialects have costless solutions, kind of:
	self error: 'cannot perform bit logic on negative integers'

Nicolas