That doesn't quite work as expected.

short MASK = 0x8000;

yields a "possible loss of precision" error, which was my original problem with the octal representation in the original library interface.

If I do an explicit cast to short (yuck):

public static final short MASK = (short) 0x8000;

It works... and simple bitwise operations seem to work without additional ugliness, so I guess that's the fix.

Regards, Ross