Bitwise NOT operator?

Hey everyone, I'm really not sure what's going on here: basically, the bitwise NOT operator seems to simply not work. Here's an example of what I see. ============Script============ $ cat bintest2.php <?php $bin = 2; $notbin = ~$bin; echo "Bin: " . decbin($bin) . " !bin: " . decbin($notbin) . "\n"; echo "Bin: $bin !bin: $notbin\n"; ?> ============================= ============Output============ $ php bintest2.php Bin: 10 !bin: 11111111111111111111111111111101 Bin: 2 !bin: -3 ============================= Obviously that's not the expected response. I expect to get something more like this: Bin: 10 !bin: 01 Bin: 2 !bin: 1 Can anyone shed some light on this for me? The server is running an old version of OpenSUSE, and php --version returns: PHP 5.2.5 with Suhosin-Patch 0.9.6.2 (cli) (built: Dec 12 2007 03:51:56) Copyright (c) 1997-2007 The PHP Group Zend Engine v2.2.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2007 Zend Technologies I get the same response on an Ubuntu 8.04 LTS server with PHP 5.2.4-2ubuntu5.10 with Suhosin-Patch 0.9.6.2. Thanks in advance, Alex McKenzie amckenzie4@gmail.com