Peter, This isn't a ram consideration as much it's a logical consideration. There are a lot of ways to handle this, I REALLY don't want to use a package here. Bit masking is incredibly useful for permutations/combinatoric algorithms. I can create my own class wrapper or functions, and optimize, but think that the __and__ operator would be a really useful syntactic tool. It would streamline these types of operations and *hopefully* help people write more efficient code.
I'm less strictly interested in the & operator explicitly working with a bit int, but think it'd be great if the was a built-in filter something like: [1,2,3,4] & [0,0,1,1] => [3,4] OR [1,2,3,4] & [False, False, True, True] = [3,4] -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
