Introduction to Programming

Evaluation order of operands

While evaluating an expression, parentheses and operator precedence are taken into account first. Then, those parts of the expression that have the same level of execution priority are evaluated as they appear when moving from left to right.

Using parentheses improves the understanding of a complex expression, but too many nested parentheses can obscure it. If in doubt, consider breaking the complex expression into several statements.

Eventually, the evaluation comes down to each operator and its operands. Operands of a binary operator are evaluated from left to right so that left-hand operand is fully evaluated before the evaluation of the right-hand operator starts. As we have seen, the left-hand operand can ...