Question

What are intuitive reasons for >= and ‘>’ to be higher precedence than |? Reference.
I could understand why || is lower as writing a>b||c is common. However I’d think a>b|c would be doing an OR before the compare. This doesn’t seem intuitive. What are examples of &^| being lower precedence then compare/equity operators being intuitive?

Answer 1

It’s a historical accident, in The Development of the C Language, Dennis Ritchie wrote:

Their tardy introduction explains an infelicity of C’s precedence rules. In B one writes

    if (a==b & c) ...

to check whether a equals b and c is non-zero; in such a conditional expression it is better that & have lower precedence than ==. In converting from B to C, one wants to replace & by && in such a statement; to make the conversion less painful, we decided to keep the precedence of the & operator the same relative to ==, and merely split the precedence of && slightly from &. Today, it seems that it would have been preferable to move the relative precedences of & and ==, and thereby simplify a common C idiom: to test a masked value against another value, one must write

    if ((a&mask) == b) ...

where the inner parentheses are required but easily forgotten.

So it’s because B used | and & for the logical operators, and C kept the precedence for the thus-denoted bitwise operators.