I think .get would be more plausible. It's just strange that we can't use [] for indexing, which is an operation that can apply to any container, but << and >>

I think .get would be more plausible. It's just strange that we can't use [] for indexing, which is an operation that can apply to any container, but << and >> must be reserved for bit-shifting. If I'm adding shifting to a new language, I'm inclined to use functions just so it's clear what's going on, and to put operations like rotation on an even footing. Also, I don't think people have an intuition for the precedence of shift operators, which makes them less useful.