why bother with operator precedence

[William H. Glass]

In article <12845 at csli.Stanford.EDU>, poser at csli.Stanford.EDU (Bill Poser) writes:
> Insisting that students use minimal parenthesization will help them
> to learn the precedence rules, but why bother?

   I recall that in McCracken's 1960ish book on Fortran programming, he
said "when in doubt parenthesize".  I feel that is still good advice.  When
trying to debug someone else's code, I'd much rather see some extra
parenthesis then find a bug caused by someone who thought that he knew the
operator precedence, but didn't.

-- 

William H. Glass                        Internet: glass at mgi.com
Management Graphics, Inc.
1401 E. 79th Street
Minneapolis, MN  55425
+1 (612) 854-1220