[ModernMech]

> Using & and | for Boolean logic operators could be seen as a useful improvement, but then how does one express bitwise and and or?

Depending on your target audience, a language could just not support these at the syntax level. There are all kinds of applications where you never have to do things at the bit level. There's no reason bitwise and/or/not/xor couldn't just be functions. Then you can also use ^ for exponentiation, which depending on the audience may be a more common operation than bitwise xor.