At 10:23 PM 4/22/98 -0700, Dan Ingalls wrote:
....
>I'm still mildly opposed to bit manipulation on negative numbers, mainly for
>simplicity, although ANSI compliance is a weak second reason.

ANSI Smaltalk doesn't forbid bit manipulations on negative numbers, it says
that the result of such an operation is undefined.

In this context "undefined" means: "If a feature is denoted undefined a
conforming implementation may accept a program using the feature, but must
document that it does so. A conforming implementation is not required to
accept an undefined feature. A program that is dependent upon the use of an
undefined feature does not conform to the standard." (section 2 page 7)

"undefined" is a very important concept within the standard.  It is one of
the main hooks used to allow implementations to provide features that go
beyond what is in the standard.

Allen_Wirfs-Brock at instantiations.com