title: Why doesn't C have rotate left/right operators?
body: <p>A bit of a philosophical question, I suppose.</p>
  
  <p>The C language has the standard set of bit-wise operations, including <code>OR</code>, <code>AND</code>, <code>XOR</code>, <code>SHIFT LEFT/RIGHT</code>, and <code>NOT</code>.  Why aren't rotate left/rotate right operators or functions included in the language?</p>
  
  <p>These operators are of the same complexity as other bit-wise operators and normally require a single assembly instruction, like the others. Besides, I can think of a lot of uses for rotate operator, probably not less than, say, <code>xor</code> operator - so it sounds a bit strange to me that they aren't included in C along with the rest.</p>
  
  <p>If you do need to rotate in C or C++, <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/776508/best-practices-for-circular-shift-rotate-operations-in-c">there's a separate FAQ question about best-practices for it</a>.  Discussion of that is off-topic for this question.</p>