Home Segments Index Top Previous Next

79: Sidetrip

The reason that the assignment operator has precedence lower than that of the output operator is that << has another meaning for which high precedence makes sense. In particular, when the operand on the left is an integral data type, << denotes the left-shift operator, a meaning C++ inherits from C. In the hardcopy version of this book, you learn that C++ allows functions and operators to have more than one meaning, which C++ keeps sorted out through what is called function and operator overloading.