🚀 go-pugleaf

Chris Marriott (chris@NOSPAM.skymap.com) wrote:

: Will Rose wrote in message <912351722.217465@optional.cts.com>...
: >The operations * and / are both left-associative, so 5 * 3 / 2 comes
: >to 7, and 5 / 2 * 3 comes to 6.

: If you don't use parentheses to force the order of evaluation, does the C
: language guarentee left-to-right evaluation? I don't have a copy of the
: language reference at hand to check.

You rapidly step off into deep water here, and I don't trust myself to
get the technical terms right.  Precedence and associativity go togther
to determine how an expression is evaluated; left-to-right evaluation
is another thing altogether, and in fact cannot, with the exception
of '&&', '||', "?:', and ',' be relied on.  The C faq, section 3.8,
has a number of practical suggestions on how to avoid pushing your
luck in this area.

Probably the best simple summary is in K&R, but for the full story
you probably need the syntax rules of the standard, which express
the precedence and associativity rules mentioned above.  ISTR this
was discussed about a year ago, and either Lawrence Kirby or Chris
Torek gave a much better explanation that I can; try Dejanews.


Will
cwr@crash.cts.com