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From: Tim Rentsch <tr.17687@z991.linuxsc.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Safety of casting from 'long' to 'int'
Date: Thu, 14 May 2026 08:37:20 -0700
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Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> writes:

[..discussing C expression syntax..]

> [...]  [Remembering precedence in C is difficult because of]
> a mis-ranking of a class of operators in "C".  (I noticed that
> already when I read K&R some time around 1985, but I first saw
> that "officially" acknowledged not too long ago when someone
> posted a link to a paper from, IIRC, some time in the 1990's
> written by one of the authors of "C".) - And that discrepancy
> detail in C's precedence ranking was actually the only reason
> for me looking "regularly" into the precedence table of my K&R.
> (The point is that - with the exception of & ^ | - the ranking
> makes perfectly sense and should be easily usable without doubt
> by a concept-knowing programmer.  But note that, historically,
> a sort of "rationale" can be formulated for the discrepancy to
> justify the given choice in context of specifically "C".  But
> still remember the "official" acknowledgement of an issue here.)

I think it's easy to remember how expressions in C work with the
help of just a few memory aids:

  1. unary operators are always ahead of binary operators, first
     those on the right and then those on the left;

  2. the bitwise operators form a sandwich enclosing the relational
     operators and the equality operators - shift (<<,>>) on top,
     and the three kinds of logical operations (&,^,|) underneath;

  3. sizeof is greedy with respect to type names:  sizeof (int)+1
     is (sizeof (int))+1, not sizeof ((int)+1)

Everything else goes where it makes sense.