binary AND operators in R

-----Original Message-----
From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org 
[mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of mauede at alice.it
Sent: Sunday, March 29, 2009 12:23 PM
To: r-help at r-project.org
Subject: [R] binary AND operators in R

I cannot find any R function or operator that performs a 
binary AND operation, as performed by Fortran built-in 
function "iand".
Ideally either R operator "&" or "&&" should do that. But 
some tests proved they do not:

A<- 1
B <- 2
A

[1] 1

B

[1] 2

as.numeric(A&B)

[1] 1

as.numeric(A&&B)

[1] 1

The binary content of A should be "10000"
The binary content of B should be "01000"
Therefore the  bitwise AND operator should yield 0 !
I do not know how to fore the binary representation of an 
unsigned integer when writing  R code. 
Do you know how to get around this problem ?

Thank you so much.
Maura