Meta Programming Operators I have a basic understanding how operators work (bitwise, logical, unary, ternary, etc.), but I am confused how you define what the operator does so the machine knows how to treat the operator when you use it in your code base. Are operators predefined by the compiler and is there a way for me to access the source code of an operator's definition?
The language specification defines what the operator does, and the compiler produces the appropriate machine instructions to implement this. In general, there's no reason to assume that the operator is implemented as a sequence of statements in the language that's being compiled (e.g., operators in C aren't first translated into longer expressions in C).

In many cases, (e.g., addition and multiplication), the appropriate machine instructions will be just one instruction.