It doesn't matter, we're talking about php not C++. But yeah, "<<" and ">>" are at fairly internally consistent within C++ and don't generally confuse programmers or cause significant bugs in my experience, so I don't find them problematic. They did seem a bit weird at first, but they didn't cause significant problems.
Perhaps they do for you, and I accept your complaint about those operators as valid actually, but it's on a whole different level of badness than php, and again, we're talking about php. Just because "other languages suck" doesn't mean php doesn't, so that's not a valid argument against anything I said.
I'm saying neither of them suck. They both have small things "Wrong" with them that are only "Wrong" because I don't like them.
>they didn't cause significant problems
That's not a valid criticism of any feature. I'd say that the worst feature of any programming language yet has been pre and post -- and ++. Some of the nastiest bugs I've seen have come from there.
In both cases I avoid them. I only really use -- and ++ if I need to, just like ternary operators.
> Just because "other languages suck" doesn't mean php doesn't,
Ok what about other languages that are good? Python's ternary operator isn't the same as C-style languages but I still think of Python as being good.
That's not the same thing and you know it. C++ didn't just randomly change the associativity of one of the operators. PHP screwed up ternery in a way that makes zero sense (ie, it's wrong in 99.99999% of use cases). It still catches me (and my colleagues) off guard even though we have years of collective PHP experience.
Do you support that? No one will ever be able to convince me that "<<" and ">>" make sense to be read and write.