Editing Operators in C and C++ (section)

===Criticism of bitwise and equality operators precedence===
The precedence of the bitwise logical operators has been criticized.<ref name="Bell">{{Citation | url = https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html | title = C history § Neonatal C| publisher = Bell labs}}.</ref> Conceptually, & and | are arithmetic operators like * and +.

The expression {{cpp|1=a & b == 7}} is syntactically parsed as {{cpp|1=a & (b == 7)}} whereas the expression {{cpp |1=a + b == 7}} is parsed as {{cpp|1=(a + b) == 7}}. This requires parentheses to be used more often than they otherwise would.

Historically, there was no syntactic distinction between the bitwise and logical operators. In [[BCPL]], [[B (programming language)|B]] and early C, the operators {{cpp|&& {{!!}}}} didn't exist. Instead {{cpp|& {{!}}}} had different meaning depending on whether they are used in a 'truth-value context' (i.e. when a Boolean value was expected, for example in {{cpp|1= if (a==b & c) {...} }} it behaved as a logical operator, but in {{cpp|1= c = a & b}} it behaved as a bitwise one). It was retained so as to keep [[backward compatibility]] with existing installations.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=1159769|title=Re^10: next unless condition|website=www.perlmonks.org|access-date=23 March 2018}}</ref>

Moreover, in C++ (and later versions of C) equality operations, with the exception of the three-way comparison operator, yield [[Boolean data type|bool]] type values which are conceptually a single bit (1 or 0) and as such do not properly belong in "bitwise" operations.