Precedence of Operators

The arithmetic operators in an expression are evaluated according to their precedence. The precedence means which operator will be evaluated first and which will be evaluated after that and so on. In an expression, the parentheses ( ) are used to force the evaluation order. The operators in the parentheses( ) are evaluated first. If there are nested parentheses then the inner most is evaluated first.

The expressions are always evaluated from left to right. The operators *, / and % have the highest precedence after parentheses. These operators are evaluated before + and – operators. Thus + and – operators has the lowest precedence. It means that if there are * and + operators in an expression then first the * will be evaluated and then its result will be added to other operand. If there are * and / operators in an expression (both have the same precedence) then the operator which occurs first from left will be evaluated first and then the next, except you force any operator to evaluate by putting parentheses around it.

The following table explains the precedence of the arithmetic operators:

Operators	Operations	Precedence (Order of evaluation)
( )	Parentheses	Evaluated first
*, /, or %	Multiplication, Division, Modulus	Evaluated second. If there are several, they are evaluated from left to right
+ or -	Addition, Subtraction	Evaluated last. If there are several, they are evaluated from left to right

Lets look some examples.

What is the result of 10 + 10 * 5 ?

The answer is 60 not 100. As * has higher precedence than + so 10 * 5 is evaluated first and then the answer 50 is added to 10 and we get the result 60. The answer will be 100 if we force the addition operation to be done first by putting 10 + 10 in parentheses. Thus the same expression rewritten as (10 + 10) * 5 will give the result 100. Note that how the parentheses affect the evaluation of an expression.

Similarly the expression 5 * 3 + 6 / 3 gives the answer 17, and not 7. The evaluation of this expression can be clarified by writing it with the use of parentheses as (5 * 3) + (6 / 3) which gives 15 + 2 = 17. Thus you should be careful while writing arithmetic expressions.

Tips

• Use spaces in the coding to make it easy to read and understand
• Reserved words can not be used as variable names
• There is always a main( ) in a C program that is the starting point of execution
• Write one statement per line
• Type parentheses ’( )’ and braces ‘{ }’ in pairs
• Use parentheses for clarification in arithmetic expressions
• Don’t forget semicolon at the end of each statement
• C Language is case sensitive so variable names x and X are two different variables

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Precedence of Operators