What are bitwise shift (bit-shift) operators and how do they work?

Question

I\'ve been attempting to learn C in my spare time, and other languages (C#, Java, etc.) have the same concept (and often the same operators) ...

What I\'m wondering

Answer 1

One gotcha is that the following is implementation dependent (according to the ANSI standard):

char x = -1;
x >> 1;

x can now be 127 (01111111) or still -1 (11111111).

In practice, it's usually the latter.