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Comment by oinksoft | Hacker News Reader

For language-specific operators I could understand ... but to me, the cognitive load of the parentheses is worse than having to think for a moment about this particular set of operators which have the same precedence in every language I've used (and the arithmetic operators which I've had to know the order of since early grade school).

Maybe I'll eat my foot some day, but

  (a == 1) && (b == 2)

  (2 * 3) + 1

is nothing but code smell to me.

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There are plenty of things that you can leave out when writing parseable source code, but don't because it would make the code horribly un-readable.

That is, there's a reason for whitespace around operators, after commas, extraneous newlines, etc. It makes the code easier to read and maintain. Now while I'm willing to admit that this whole area is largely aesthetic and personal, if you submitted a line of code to me that was just this without the parentheses:

> 2 * 3 + 1

I would reject the code review in a heartbeat. Part of making your code readable to others and less error-prone during maintenance is adding extraneous stuff to it that isn't necessary for the code to parse/compile/interpret.

Those are both perfectly reasonable to me. There are in fact languages that would interpret your example #1 incorrectly, so if someone wants to disambiguate I have no qualms. Your example #2 is sort of braindead, but in a more complicated expression, where 2 3 or 1 were method calls or something, I would appreciate the parens.

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