Order of evaluation of the operands of any C operator, including the order of evaluation of function arguments in a function-call expression, and the order of evaluation of the subexpressions within any expression is unspecified (except where noted below). The compiler will evaluate them in any order, and may choose another order when the same expression is evaluated again.
There is no concept of left-to-right or right-to-left evaluation in C, which is not to be confused with left-to-right and right-to-left associativity of operators: the expressionf1()+ f2()+ f3() is parsed as(f1()+ f2())+ f3() due to left-to-right associativity ofoperator+, but the function call tof3() may be evaluated first, last, or betweenf1() orf2() at run time.
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There are two kinds of evaluations performed by the compiler for each expression or subexpression (both of which are optional):
volatile lvalue, modification (writing) to an object, atomic synchronization(since C11), modifying a file, modifying the floating-point environment (if supported), or calling a function that does any of those operations.If no side effects are produced by an expression and the compiler can determine that the value is not used, the expressionmay not be evaluated.
Sequenced-before is an asymmetric, transitive, pair-wise relationship between evaluations within the same thread (it may extend across threads if atomic types and memory barriers are involved).
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&& (logical AND),|| (logical OR), and, (comma).?:5) There is a sequence point at the end of a full declarator. 6) There is a sequence point immediately before the return of a library function. | (since C99) |
9) The value computations (but not the side-effects) of the operands to any operator are sequenced before the value computation of the result of the operator (but not its side-effects). 10) The side effect (modification of the left argument) of the direct assignment operator and of all compound assignment operators is sequenced after the value computation (but not the side effects) of both left and right arguments. 11) The value computation of the post-increment and post-decrement operators is sequenced before its side-effect. 12) A function call that is not sequenced before or sequenced after another function call is indeterminately sequenced (CPU instructions that constitute different function calls cannot be interleaved, even if the functions are inlined) 13) Ininitialization list expressions, all evaluations are indeterminately sequenced 14) With respect to an indeterminately-sequenced function call, the operation of compound assignment operators, and both prefix and postfix forms of increment and decrement operators are single evaluations. | (since C11) |
i=++i+ i++;// undefined behaviori= i+++1;// undefined behaviorf(++i,++i);// undefined behaviorf(i=-1, i=-1);// undefined behavior
f(i, i++);// undefined behaviora[i]= i++;// undefined behavior
Operator precedence which defines how expressions are built from their source code representation.
C++ documentation forOrder of evaluation |