Weird usage of conditional operator (>?=) [duplicate]

Answer 1

This is the "maximum" assignment operator, a GCC extension.

• If the extension is not enabled, then you will not be able to use this feature.

• As of 4.0.1:

  The G++ minimum and maximum operators (<? and >?) and their compound forms (<?=) and >?=) have been deprecated and will be removed in a future version. Code using these operators should be modified to use std::min and std::max instead.

• It looks like they were gone by 4.0.4.

Answer 2

That's not C++ code.

It's using a gnu-only extension, and is completely non-portable.

Just replace it with standard-compliant code:

if (d < somethingbigger) d = somethingbigger;

Answer 3

IIRC, this is the shorter version of d = max(d, somethingBigger); or

d = (d < somethingbigger) ? somethingbigger : d;

Haven't seen this in a while though and I'm pretty sure thats a GNU extension to GCC.