Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!yale!cmcl2!brl-adm!brl-smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Another issue in the = and == war (you wanna read this)
Message-ID: <7070@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: 13 Jan 88 06:59:16 GMT
References: <1168@ark.cs.vu.nl>
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 13

In article <1168@ark.cs.vu.nl>, maart@cs.vu.nl (Maarten Litmaath) writes:
> So, why is the priority of `=' chosen to be less than the priority of
> `==' (in this case `!=') ?

Some of the precedence choices for C (p.49 of K&R) are admittedly poor,
mostly those involving bitwise and shift operators.  They can't be
changed at this point; too much correctly-written code would be invalidated.

I fairly often write things like
	bool	done;
	/* ... */
	done = nextp == NULL;
In general, it is good for assignment to have very low precedence.