alt Hacker NewsIMO, The only reasonable answer if asked this in an interview is “I would not write code where I have to know the answer to this question”
These sorts of things are neat trivia to learn about things like sequence points but 99.9% of the time if it matters in your codebase you're writing something unmaintainable.
Replies
The answers to some questions must be known in order to be able to write a correct program.
In the vast majority of the programming languages, the order of evaluation for the actual parameters passed to a function is undefined. In the few programming languages where the order of evaluation is defined, that is actually a mistake in the design of that programming language.
This is something about which any programmer must be well aware, because when composing function invocations it is very easy to write a function invocation where the result would depend on the order of evaluation of the expressions passed as actual parameters. The arithmetic operators are also function invocations, so that applies to them too.
On one hand I've been using almost the exact statement 25 years ago in my Flash (ecmascript) tutorials to narrow down the point of operator precedence.
I still believe it's a good piece on your powerpoint if you want to teach. It's easy to fall, easy to grasp, and easy to unroll all the rules - that is, if the rules are actually set in stone.
On the other hand I've been through couple FAANG interviews, and twice I was presented with something similar and after I glanced at it for a half a minute the interviewer quickly proceed to "a ha!, you don't know! the interview is over , but I'm happy to tell you the right answer".
That part is not cool.
> IMO, The only reasonable answer if asked this in an interview is “I would not write code where I have to know the answer to this question”
That's half of a reasonable answer. The other half is "but I do know the answer so if I see it when reviewing or working on someone else's code I can flag it or rewrite it, and explain to them why it is bad".