>  From: James Kanze [mailto: kanze@[...].. ]
> 
>  Let's face it, even << is a hack, and a horrible misuse of operator
>  overloading. We get away with it because of the precedence, the fact
>  that it is little used, and the suggestiveness of its graphic
>  presentation.

Indeed. It's bewildering how something as personal preferency as << ever
made it into the standard. Such a break from tradition just for convenience
and brevity was totally out of line.

I mean really, how hard would it be for someone to use a plain, vanilla
function call, like:

y = left_shift(x, 8)

:-]