C style peeve and knowing the rules

News system news at ism780c.isc.com
Tue Mar 27 13:18:15 AEST 1990


In article <19356 at megaron.cs.arizona.edu> robert at cs.arizona.edu (Robert J. Drabek) writes:
>I require my students to use the absolute minimum number of parenthesis
>until they have ALL the rules down pat.

I would hope you don't fault your students for writing:

      x = a << (i+j);

Here is what Dennis Ritchie says in "The C programming Language, The Bell
System Technical Journal, July-August 1978" under the heading "Unfavorable
experiences":

    There are some occasionally suprising operator precedences.  For
    example a >> 4 + 5 shifts right by 9.

   Marv Rubinstein



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