signed.icn: Procedure to put bits into signed integer

link signed
April 2, 1990; Robert J. Alexander
This file is in the public domain.

signed(s,n) -- Puts raw bits of characters of string s into an
integer.  The value is taken as signed.

If large integers are supported, this routine will work for integers
of arbitrary size.

If large integers are not supported, the following are true:

  If the size of s is the same as or greater than the size of an
  integer in the Icon implementation, the result will be negative or
  positive depending on the value of the integer's sign bit.

  If the size of s is less than the size of an integer, the bytes are
  put into the low order part of the integer, with the remaining high
  order bytes filled with sign bits (the high order bit of the first
  character of the string).  If the string is too large, the most
  significant bytes will be lost.

This procedure is normally used for processing of binary data read
from a file.