Reason for precedence of instanceof/is

Question

In both C#/Java the operator precedence of is respectively instanceof leads to some ugly necessary parenthesis. For example instead of writing if (!bar instanceof Foo) you have to write if (!(bar instanceof Foo)).

So why did the language teams decide that ! has a higher operator precedence than is/instanceof? Admittedly in C# you can overwrite operator! which would lead to a different result in some situations, but those situations seems exceedingly rare (and non-intuitive in any case), while the case of checking if something is not a type or subtype of something is much more likely.

Answer 1

In Java, instanceof is one of the relational operators and has the same precedence as the other ones:

RelationalExpression:
    ShiftExpression
    RelationalExpression < ShiftExpression
    RelationalExpression > ShiftExpression
    RelationalExpression <= ShiftExpression
    RelationalExpression >= ShiftExpression
    RelationalExpression instanceof ReferenceType

From that perspective it makes sense that those two lines should follow the same structure:

if (!(a instanceof b))
if (!(a < b))