[Normal_gaussian]

You're going to have to give a much clearer set of examples and justifications. I've had to CAS on bit masks, but not enough that it would make sense to introduce a new operation for it. I just CAS and spin if it fails and the bitmask is still valid.

[goofy_lemur]

all right, I am doing a sort of a copy-on-write thing here. So the idea is that I only want to update the pointer if the record it points to is "unlocked"