In this question that I posted, I received an answer that uses the bit shifting operators << and >>. Can someone explain to me how this works? It appears to be translating, as if piping the value from one thing into the other all on one line in a series of left bit shift or right bit shift.
Please realize that I'm new to C++. I haven't studied it in 20 years, and I'm learning it again.
Those are overloaded operators they're not actually doing any bitshifting, your example seems to be using ostream's << operator which inserts data into the output stream.
here are some other topics on operation overloading Operator overloading Basically, any operator can be re-purposed for the use on other types, including non primitive types. In the example you listed, we would really have to know what types the << operator was being used on. For streams, the << and >> operators have been overloaded to write content to the stream or read content from the stream.
