Does it make sense for unary operators to be associative?

Question

The C++ operator precedence table from http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/operator_precedence (I know it\'s not normative, but the standard doesn\'t talk about preced

Answer 1

Consider the following piece of code

int *p;
*p++;

The expression *p++ can be evaluated as either (*p)++ (incrementing the object that p points to) or *(p++) (pointing to the next object pointed by p).

Because unary operators are right associative the expression *p++ will be evaluated as *(p++). (I came up with this while reading Kernighan and Ritchie.)

It seems that the precedence and associativity has been changed and postfix ++ has higher precedence than dereference * operator.

According to C11 the above expression will be evaluated as *(p++).

I hope this makes it more clear why unary operators have associativity.

Thanks to Lucian Grigore for pointing this out.