[GAP Forum] binary arithmetic

[Luca Giuzzi]

Dear Forum,
 I have been working with some elements defined over a large finite
field (K=GF(2^20), actually) and I have a few questions.

 1) does there exist a "proper" way to obtain a vector representation
(any representation is fine) for elements of K over the ground field?
I have successfully used the idiom x![1] for x in K, but I suspect
that this is more of an implementation detail than what is supposed to
be used.

 2) In any case ended up working with sets of vectors of GF(2)^20. I
would have liked to be able to represent each vector as an integer
(this is easy) and to implement the sum of any two of them as a xor
between their representatives. I have not been able to find a xor
operation being exposed (not even in the cvec package). Am I missing
something?
[actually, I ended up writing an external program to perform the
checks I was interested in]

With many thanks and kind regards,
 lg