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 According to the The Java Language Specification (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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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;
  }
}

...

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

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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.

Related Guidelines

Bibliography

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