C++ defines a bunch of aliases for operators. These are kind of cool, and they can make code more readable at times – for example you can write things like:
if ((dest bitor netmask) == bcdest and protocol == udp)
But in typical C++ fashion, they chose to specify it in a completely brain-dead way. The names don’t alias the operators they’re named for, but their actual punctuation representations. That means this is valid code:
Address parse(const std::string bitand repr);
The ability to do this doesn’t really help anyone, except lazy compiler vendors who want to implement the aliases as predefined macros. But it gives us all one more WTF, and another tool in our arsenal for writing obfuscated code.
