Why doesn't C have rotate left/right operators?

Posted by icepack on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by icepack
Published on 2012-10-27T10:39:37Z Indexed on 2012/10/27 11:00 UTC
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bitwise-operators

A bit of a philosophical question, I suppose. Hope it belongs here.

C language has the standard set of bit-wise operations, including OR, AND, XOR, SHIFT LEFT/RIGHT, NOT. Anyone has an idea why rotate left/rotate right isn't included in the language? These operators are of the same complexity as other bit-wise operators and normally require a single assembly instruction, like the others. Besides, I can think of a lot of uses for rotate operator, probably not less than, say, xor operator - so it sounds a bit strange to me that they aren't included in C along with the rest.

Edit: Please stop suggesting implementations of rotation operators. I know how to do that and it's not what the question about.

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