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 According to The Java Language Specification (JLS)According to the JLS, §15.7, "Evaluation Order" [JLS 20052015]:

The Java programming language guarantees that the operands of operators appear to be evaluated in a specific evaluation order, namely, from left to right.

§15.7.3, "Evaluation Respects Parentheses and Precedence" adds:

Java programming language implementations must respect the order of evaluation as indicated explicitly by parentheses and implicitly by operator precedence.

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The programmer in this example incorrectly assumes that the rightmost subexpression is evaluated first because the * operator has a higher precedence than the + operator and because the subexpression is parenthesized. This assumption leads to the incorrect conclusion that number is assigned 0 because of the rightmost number = get() subexpression. Consequently, the test in the left-hand subexpression is expected to reject the unprivileged user because the value of number is below the threshold of 10.

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class BadPrecedence {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    int number = 17;
    int threshold = 10;
    number = (number > threshold ? 0 : -2) 
             + ((31 * ++number) * (number = get()));
    // ... 
    if (number == 0) {
      System.out.println("Access granted");
    } else {
      System.out.println("Denied access"); // number = -2
    }
  }

  public static int get() {
    int number = 0;
    // Assign number to non zerononzero value if authorized, else 0
    return number;
  }
}

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This noncompliant code example reorders the previous expression so that the left-to-right evaluation order of the operands corresponds with the programmer's intent. Although this code performs as expected, it still represents poor practice by writing to number three times in a single expression.

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final int authnum = get();
number = ((31 * (number + 1)) * authnum) + (authnum > threshold ? 0 : -2);

Exceptions

EXP05-J-EX0: The increment and decrement operators (++) and (--) read a numeric variable, and then assign a new value to the variable. While Although these operators read and modify a value, they are well-understood and are an exception to this rule. This exception does not apply if a value modified by an increment or decrement operator is subsequently read or written.

EXP05-J-EX1: The logical operators conditional-or || and conditional-and && operators have well-understood short-circuit semantics.   Writes Writes followed by subsequent writes or reads does do not violate this rule if they occur in different subexpressions operands of || or &&.  Consider Consider the following code example:

public void exampleMethod(InputStream in) {
  int i;
  // Process chars until '' found
  while ((i = in.read()) != -1 && i != '\'' && 
         (i = in.read()) != -1 && i != '\'') {
    // ...
  }

}

The This rule is not violated by the controlling expression of the while loop does not violate this rule because the subexpressions on either side of the because the rule is not violated by any operand to the conditional-and && operators do not violate it. The first and third subexpressions have exactly subexpressions (i = in.read()) != -1 have one assignment and one side effect (the reading of a character from in).

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Failure to understand the evaluation order of expressions containing side effects can result in unexpected output.

Automated Detection

Detection of all expressions involving both side effects and multiple operator precedence levels is straightforward. Determining the correctness of such uses is infeasible in the general case; heuristic warnings could be useful.

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Related Guidelines

Bibliography

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