[colejohnson66]

Is there an explanation on why C’s operator precedence is weird? Such as: why does the bitwise AND have higher precedence than logical AND?

[compiler-guy]

There is, and it is amusing

“In retrospect it would have been better to go ahead and change the precedence of & to higher than ==, but it seemed safer just to split & and && without moving & past an existing operator. (After all, we had several hundred kilobytes of source code, and maybe 3 installations....)“

https://www.lysator.liu.se/c/dmr-on-or.html

[briantakita]

> why does the bitwise AND have higher precedence than logical AND?

Why is this precedence weird? Bitwise AND tends to be used to transform data while a logical AND tends to be used for control flow.

[colejohnson66]

I meant equals having a higher precedence than bitwise AND.

As in:

    if (x & 2 == 2)

...is actually parsed as:

    if (x & (2 == 2))

...which isn’t intuitive.

[compiler-guy]

See the above example from dmr himself