Reputation: 3599
In the C programing language, why do the bitwise operators (& and |) have lower precedence than the equality operator (==)? It does not make sense to me.
Upvotes: 51
Views: 7660
Reputation: 1564
It doesn't make sense to Dennis Ritchie, either, in retrospect.
&& and || were added to the language after | and &, and precedence was maintained for reasons of compatibility.
Upvotes: 19
Reputation: 4934
You need to ask Brian Kernighan or Dennis Ritchie.
From the forum post Operator precedence:
The && and || operators were added later for their "short-circuiting" behavior. Dennis Ritchie admits in retrospect that the precedence of the bitwise operators should have been changed when the logical operators were added. But with several hundred kilobytes of C source code in existence at that point and an installed base of three computers, Dennis thought it would be too big of a change in the C language...
So, that might be a reason? I'm guessing since there are several layers of bitwise precedence (unlike relational comparisons) that it's cruft that's existed since...forever...and just was never corrected.
Upvotes: 57
Reputation: 373112
I don't have an authoritative answer as to why K&R chose the precedence they did. One example that makes a fair amount of sense would be this one:
if (x == 1 & y == 0) {
/* ... */
}
Since this is the bitwise AND operator, it uses a non-short-circuiting evaluation mode, as would
if (x == 1 | y == 0) {
/* ... */
}
use the non-short-circuiting OR operator. This is probably why they chose to have the precedence group this way, but I agree with you that in retrospect it doesn't seem like a good idea.
Upvotes: 5