Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!purdue!mentor.cc.purdue.edu!l.cc.purdue.edu!cik
From: cik@l.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: why bother with operator precedence
Message-ID: <2031@l.cc.purdue.edu>
Date: 27 Mar 90 16:03:49 GMT
References: <2205@osc.COM> <340018@hplvli.HP.COM> <19356@megaron.cs.arizona.edu> <1379@ux.acs.umn.edu>
Organization: Purdue University Statistics Department
Lines: 22

In article <1379@ux.acs.umn.edu>, tongwu@ux.acs.umn.edu (Tong Wu) writes:
> In article <12845@csli.Stanford.EDU> poser@csli.stanford.edu (Bill Poser) writes:
< >Insisting that students use minimal parenthesization will help them
< >......
< >
< >So, why bother with precedence?
 
> An excellent point!  Using minimal parenthesization to achieve maximal use
> of precedence rules is like not declearing variables, in Fortran, in order
> to use the default variable types.
 

It is much worse.  The precedence rules in algebra are well known, but the
arbitrary ones in C are not, and are not intuitive.  What is the precedence
for 

		a << b + c 

-- 
Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907
Phone: (317)494-6054
hrubin@l.cc.purdue.edu (Internet, bitnet, UUCP)