Developer knowledge of operator precedence and the issue of what
they intended to write are interesting topics. Some experimental
work is described in (binary operators only I'm afraid):
www.knosof.co.uk/cbook/accu06a.pdfwww.knosof.co.uk/cbook/accu07a.pdf
The ACCU 2006 experiment provides evidence that developer knowledge
is proportional to the number of occurrences of a construct in
source code, it also shows a stunningly high percentage of incorrect
answers.
The ACCU 2007 experiment provides evidence that the names of the
operands has a significant impact on operator precedence choice.
I wonder what kind of names are used as the operand of unary
operators?
I would expect the ~ operator to have a bitwise name, but the
! operator might have an arithmetic or bitwise name.
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Derek M. Jones tel: +44 (0) 1252 520 667
Knowledge Software Ltd mailto:derek@knosof.co.uk
Applications Standards Conformance Testing http://www.knosof.co.uk
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