Comments on: Operator Precedence in ColdFusion

By: Adrian J. Moreno

Adrian J. Moreno — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 21:55:44 +0000

As a former Math major and after wading through years’ worth of someone else’s legacy code, I would love to make parentheses a required part of coding standards. I love that you used such a simple example to show what kind of errors can occur based on how one person reads vs. another (vs. a computer). The same can be said with some of the code I saw last year:

cfif x AND y AND z OR a AND b OR c AND d

WTF?

cfif (x AND y) AND (z OR ( a AND b) OR (c AND d))

Ah. Ok.

By: Dan G. Switzer, II

Dan G. Switzer, II — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 15:41:56 +0000

Good post.

I always use parentheses not only do I prefer explicit precedence, I believe it’s much easier to interpret the code to the human eye.

While “3 + 4 * 5″ may behave like you intended, it’s too easy to accidentally interpret this as “(3 + 4) * 5″ when you looking at the code. Explicitly writing the code as “3 + (4 * 5)” makes it very clear on the intend formula.

This hold true for operators as well…