 <p>In the current standard, tokenization is greedy, so <code>&gt;&gt;</code> will be processed as a single token, in the same way that <code>a +++ b</code> will be parsed as <code>a ++ + b</code>. This has changed and the new standard. While it requires more work from the compiler implementors, it was deemed that overall it is worth it (and some mayor compilers already implement that as an extension anyway).</p>