Developer's Topics
Chapter 2, Complying with standard C

Parentheses grouping and evaluation

Parentheses grouping and evaluation

ANSI C is often erroneously described as honoring parentheses or evaluating according to parentheses due to an incomplete understanding or an inaccurate presentation.

Since ANSI C expressions simply have the grouping specified by their parsing, parentheses still only serve as a way of controlling how an expression is parsed; the natural precedence and associativity of expressions carry exactly the same weight as parentheses.

The above expression could have been written as:

   i = (((*(++p)) + f()) + g());
with no different effect on its grouping or evaluation.