What's the result of a & b?

Question

This is awkward, but the bitwise AND operator is defined in the C++ standard as follows (emphasis mine).

The usual arithmetic conversions are performe

Answer 1

[basic.fundamental]/3 defers to C 5.2.4.2.1. It seems reasonable that the bitwise operators in C++ being underspecified should similarly defer to C, in this case 6.5.10/4:

The result of the binary & operator is the bitwise AND of the operands (that is, each bit in the result is set if and only if each of the corresponding bits in the converted operands is set).

Note that C 6.5/4 has:

Some operators (the unary operator ~, and the binary operators <<, >>, &, ^, and |, collectively described as bitwise operators) are required to have operands that have integer type. These operators yield values that depend on the internal representations of integers, and have implementation-defined and undefined aspects for signed types.

The internal representations of the integers are of course described in 6.2.6.2/1, /2.