C++ Primer Plus

Alternative Representations of Bitwise Operators

C++ provides alternative representations of several bitwise operators, as shown in Table E.4. They are provided for locales that do not have the traditional bitwise operators as part of their character sets.

Table E.4. Bitwise Operator Representations

These alternative forms let you write statements like the following:

b = compl a bitand b;  // same as b = ~a & b;c = a xor b;           // same as c = a ^ c;