9 Mar
2025
9 Mar
'25
11:39 p.m.
The C operator precedence table has 15 precedence levels, from “++" down to “,"
(see https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/language/operator_precedence)
This is nuts. I don’t remember them and I wouldn’t trust an engineer who claimed to.
Around 2005, when I was doing some chip verification, I found a hard to notice operator
precedence bug (in VHDL, but it is the same issue) that would have cost us a half-million
dollar mask spin.
If there is more than one operator, I use parens (I do write a[x] + b[x], that one I
know.)
Our K-12 system isn’t doing us any favors when they think PEMDAS is “mathematics”.
-L
PS I’ve been a little angry about this since my 6th grader got marked down for using
“extra” parentheses in class.
https://larry.stewart.org/2010/12/05/order-of-operations-evil-and-perniciou…
On Mar 9, 2025, at 19:12, Larry McVoy
<lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
Anyway, I frankly prefer to see explicit parens,
so the precedence
is clear ??? it's easier to read and less error-prone for the maintainer.
This, a thousand times, this. I taught my guys "think of coding as write
once, read many. I could care less how much more work it is, write code
such that it is the easiest to understand".