6.7.2 Caveats for Shift Operations

Warning: If the shift count is greater than or equal to the width in bits of the promoted first operand, the results are machine-dependent. Logically speaking, the “correct” value would be either -1 (for right shift of a negative number) or 0 (in all other cases), but the actual result is whatever the machine’s shift instruction does in that case. So unless you can prove that the second operand is not too large, write code to check it at run time.

Warning: Never rely on how the shift operators relate in precedence to other arithmetic binary operators. Programmers don’t remember these precedences, and won’t understand the code. Always use parentheses to explicitly specify the nesting, like this:

a + (b << 5)   /* Shift first, then add.  */
(a + b) << 5   /* Add first, then shift.  */

Note: according to the C standard, shifting of signed values isn’t guaranteed to work properly when the value shifted is negative, or becomes negative during the operation of shifting left. However, only pedants have a reason to be concerned about this; only computers with strange shift instructions could plausibly do this wrong. In GNU C, the operation always works as expected,