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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.
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1) What is the Priority among (*, /, %), (+, -) and (=) C Operators.? Explanation: Assignment operator in C has the least priority.
This affects how an expression is evaluated. Certain operators have higher precedence than others; for example, the multiplication operator has higher precedence than the addition operator. Here, operators with the highest precedence appear at the top of the table, those with the lowest appear at the bottom.
You need to ask Brian Kernighan or Dennis Ritchie.
From this forum: http://bytes.com/topic/c/answers/167377-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 precendence (unlike relational comparisons) that it's cruft that's existed since...forever...and just was never corrected.
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