[TUHS] What would early alternatives to C have been?

[Lawrence Stewart]

The C operator precedence table has 15 precedence levels, from “++" down to “,"
(see https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/language/operator_precedence)

This is nuts.  I don’t remember them and I wouldn’t trust an engineer who claimed to.

Around 2005, when I was doing some chip verification, I found a hard to notice operator precedence bug (in VHDL, but it is the same issue) that would have cost us a half-million dollar mask spin.

If there is more than one operator, I use parens (I do write a[x] + b[x], that one I know.)

Our K-12 system isn’t doing us any favors when they think PEMDAS is “mathematics”.

-L

PS I’ve been a little angry about this since my 6th grader got marked down for using “extra” parentheses in class.
https://larry.stewart.org/2010/12/05/order-of-operations-evil-and-pernicious/


> On Mar 9, 2025, at 19:12, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
>> Anyway, I frankly prefer to see explicit parens, so the precedence
>> is clear ??? it's easier to read and less error-prone for the maintainer.
> 
> This, a thousand times, this.  I taught my guys "think of coding as write
> once, read many.  I could care less how much more work it is, write code
> such that it is the easiest to understand".

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