C style peeve and knowing the rules

[Jim Harkins]

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.  After leaving my courses (or in
>the privacy of their own PC) they'll do whatever feels good, but I will
>have done my job as well as I can by getting them to understand these
>details.

My God I hope I never ever run into one of your students.  Pray tell, what
does

	x = *a->b++ + ++z / 3 << 9^6 + 3 >> 2 ^ 5 <= 98 *~ c % d--;

evaluate to?  And is it really what the programmer intended?  Are you sure?
Why penalize a student for trying to make his code both more readable and
maintainable?  And are you sure they don't get the code working using
parens, then re-edit it to remove the 'unneeded' parens?  I sure would!

-- 
jim		jharkins at sagpd1

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