Simple c program-please explain output.

output: 20

I could not understand why it prints '20' ? please explain it !

Because it is bad code - a counter-example to illustrate something you should avoid. It is common to have these puzzles set as academic exercises, but they are pointless - what do you learn from this? - That implausible code is hard to fathom and unlikely to work - so what!?

An example of dangerous code that a reasonable but unwary person might nonetheless write might be useful, but no reasonable person would write code like that, so you learn nothing useful by doing this because you would not reasonably write such code if your intent was to get some work done!

With 22 years of professional software development I cannot answer your question, mostly because I choose not to wast my time of such exercises; not knowing that has not hindered my career - in fact while you think about it, I'll get on with something useful and productive.

If your tutor or professor set their exercise, tell him to stop wasting your time (and ours), and teach you something useful.

thanks to b49P23TIvg, clifford

I wish I could be convinced that is the purpose of this stupid assignment, but somehow I doubt it is. We are talking about the land of Turbo C after all.

This example has the additional ambiguity of operator identification. for example is:
interpreted as or?

I still don't know and still don't care!

I'd guess that's not ambiguous. Like you, I didn't investigate.

If anyone else is interested, PHP gives 22:



Python gives 28:



Perl gives 21:

Yes, but who knows what it'll say when the next version of PHP (or perl or python) is released . Might be interesting to see what happens if you use IronPython or JPython or facebook's custom PHP compiler.

The bad thing about expressions like this is that the same C compiler may give you different values of output depending on the optimization settings. All the answers are correct per the standard, as the result is undefined.

Since python hasn't got ++ -- operators,
the python result is strictly determined by precedence and the result of monadic negation and monadic identity.

>>> print --a+--a+a+++a
28

is the same as 4 * a
and therefore a was 7.

Good point .

More evidence in favor of Python being the sanest modern programming language. (I'm not saying it definitely is, but I'd wager it's in the top three.)

The problem is that if you post Python code here without code tags it becomes semantically different by loss of indentation and impossible to reverse back to the original (short of viewing the raw HTML). For that reason alone it is insane. On the other hand you never get any arguments about the one true style -but that speaks more to the insanity of coders rather than the sanity of Python.

Wait...lack of the -- and ++ operators makes it more sane?