[MaxBarraclough]

> you could write [...] but of course, this means you can't write

I found this rather difficult to read. You could write those expressions. They're legal C code. Whether they will have the expected semantics will depend on, well, what you expected.

The more general problem is code that relies too heavily on precedence rules in the first place. Precedence-related bugs and readability issues are easily avoided, just use parentheses. As I mentioned in another comment in this thread, some languages force the programmer to do this.

[goto11]

Sure, you can use parentheses everywhere, but the code would be quite noisy. Do you think this:

  ((window.location).href) == foo;

is more readable than:

  window.location.href == foo;

[MaxBarraclough]

I said code that relies too heavily on precedence rules. Your example doesn't do so.

In another comment [0] I mentioned that the Ada and Pony languages force the programmer to use parentheses when the expression would otherwise be confusingly reliant on precedence rules. Neither language requires unwieldy overuse of parentheses.

This C programming style advice article similarly recommends a middle-ground approach. [1]

I agree that unnecessary syntactic noise is bad (although this is essentially true by definition, as it's always a derogative). It can harm readability and make bugs more likely.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38886613

[1] https://wiki.sei.cmu.edu/confluence/display/c/EXP00-C.+Use+p...