A small question about C.

[brooksmoses]

How is it possible that people actually use programming languages for which the phrase "the precedence of comma is lower than the precedence of assignment" is a meaningful statement?

And how is it possible that they write code for which the truth or falsity of that statement is relevant, and still manage to appear sane at 7am after being up for 10 hours writing it?

Comments

[mayaknife.livejournal.com]

I can't speak for other programmers, but after having learned SNOBOL, where whitespace was not only an operator but one which changed meaning depending upon where it appeared in a statement, precedence issues in C seemed like the promised land.

Besides, I always use parentheses whenever I work with the more obscure operators.

[mapache]

And it's not like C has tupling anyway, so it's not like that should be a *hard* question.

Of course, I did spend Sunday taking a look at some old Perl code of mine that broke and deciding that trying to fix the Perl would be more effort than reimplementing the whole thing in Python. I have to say that nuking that gibberish feels so damn good...