Thanks for the defense, but to be honest I think GP has a point. Why on earth I would have used 2's complement conventions for what is truly just a boolean/bis

Thanks for the defense, but to be honest I think GP has a point. Why on earth I would have used 2's complement conventions for what is truly just a boolean/bistate flag is far from obvious, and it ought to be (better) commented. One thing I would say in my own defense is that one aspect of remote-distributed cooperative development is that sometimes the conversations you have with others (e.g. on IRC, or mattermost or even discord if that's your thing) can sometimes feel as if you've just "written the documentation", even though it will generally vanish into the ether. I think that is what happened here. I remember discussing it with others on our IRC dev channel, but I don't keep logs.