Question

The following code has me confused

int a=2,b=5,c;
c=a+++b;
printf("%d,%d,%d",a,b,c);

I expected the output to be 3,5,8, mainly because a++ means 2 +1 which equals 3, and 3 + 5 equals 8, so I expected 3,5,8. It turns out that the result is 3,5,7. Can someone explain why this is the case?

Answer 1

It’s parsed as c = a++ + b, and a++ means post-increment, i.e. increment after taking the value of a to compute a + b == 2 + 5.

Please, never write code like this.