Why are bitwise shifts (<< and>>) used for cout and cin?

Question

Question is in the title really; I\'m sure there is something logical, but for now I\'m stumped!

Answer 1

They are not bitwise operators, They are called insertion and extraction operators in this context.

http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/tutorial/basic_io/

These are used only for visual interpretation. If you study developing own stream and operator overloading, then you can see that you can even use + for input and - for output :)