Additional clarification. The integer reason was the main reason it wasn't in the language, but various libraries have always been available to do bitwise opera

Additional clarification. The integer reason was the main reason it wasn't in the language, but various libraries have always been available to do bitwise operations. Lua 5.2 included a bitwise library as part of the standard library (which is now redundant and deprecated). As a library, there were edge cases such as what if you used the number as floating point or what happens with 64-bit. Now with integers, bitwise operations can be put directly into the language instead as a library.