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Re: -Wparentheses lumps too much together


All,

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.pdf
www.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.

The data from the ACCU06 experiment might be used to select a cutoff
above (ie, frequency of occurrence or developer performance) which
operator pairs will not be flagged as requiring parenthesis.

If GCC wanted to be even more selective it could look at the operand
names before deciding whether to complain.

ps.
I am always on he look out for opportunities to run experiments
using experienced developers.  Does anybody have any suggestions
for conferences I might approach?

--
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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