Question

I know that == was chosen for equality and = for assignment because they thought that people did more assignment than checking for equality—but surely they didn’t think that there would be more bit fiddling than boolean logic?

Why not go the other way around, with & and | being logical operators?

Answer 1

From the horse’s mouth:

Rapid changes continued after the language had been named, for example the introduction of the && and || operators. In BCPL and B, the evaluation of expressions depends on context: within if and other conditional statements that compare an expression’s value with zero, these languages place a special interpretation on the and (&) and or (|) operators. In ordinary contexts, they operate bitwise, but in the B statement

    if (e1 & e2) ...

the compiler must evaluate e1 and if it is non-zero, evaluate e2, and if it too is non-zero, elaborate the statement dependent on the if. The requirement descends recursively on & and | operators within e1 and e2. The short-circuit semantics of the Boolean operators in such `truth-value’ context seemed desirable, but the overloading of the operators was difficult to explain and use. At the suggestion of Alan Snyder, I introduced the && and || operators to make the mechanism more explicit.

Remember that C wasn’t created in a vacuum; much of its weirdness can be traced to BCPL and B.