Operator precedence

Operator precedence determines the way in which operators are parsed with respect to each other. Operators with higher precedence become the operands of operators with lower precendence.

A common example:

3 + 4 * 5 // returns 23

The multiplication operator ("*") has higher precedence than the addition operator ("+"), thus the expression 4 * 5 will become the right operand of the addition instead of 3 + 4 becoming the left operand of the multiplication.

Associativity

Associativity determines the way in which operators of the same precedence are parsed. For example, consider an expression:

a OP b OP c

Left-associativity (left-to-right) means that it is processed as (a OP b) OP c, while right-associativity (right-to-left) means it is interpreted as a OP (b OP c). Assignment operators are right-associative, so you can write:

a = b = 5;

with the expected result that a and b get the value 5. This is because the assignment operator returns the value that it assigned. First, b is set to 5. Then the a is also set to 5, the return value of b = 5, aka right operand of the assignment.

Table

The following table is ordered from highest (20) to lowest (0) precedence.