Is shift operator a practical concept ?

Question

when we can use or we must use shift operator in c++?

Answer 1

The shift operator is mainly used in bit manipulation. See https://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html

In every day programming I doubt you'll use it much.
Currently I'm working on a gameboy emulator and there you have to read individual bits all the time. You'll see <<, >>, &, |, ^'s all over the place.

Answer 2

It's useful in bitwise operations for graphics/imagery. We used this in a class to do image editing in Java (i.e. gaussian blur, grayscale, etc)