Hexadecimal representation of a negative number

[Brian Mokrzycki]

Hi all,

        I'm running into a problem between Guile 1.6.4 and Guile 1.8.7.  
Basically I'm manipulating bit masks in Guile and need to generate a 
hexadecimal string representation of an integer.  Unfortutely this worked just 
fine in Guile 1.6.4 but not so well in Guile 1.8.7.

The offending statement:

guile> (number->string #xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF 16)

Resolves to

"-1" in Guile 1.8.7
"ffffffffffffffff" in Guile 1.6.4

It appears that Guile is treating the number as a signed value in 1.8 and an 
unsigned value in 1.6.  I'm really looking for the 1.6 interpretation. Is this 
a bug?  If not, how to get this to come out as an unsigned value?

-Brian