A story about why cautious parentheses never hurt

Today I was trying to implement reading of ushort values from a little-endian byte array. The code to retrieve a single value was pretty simple – shift the second byte by 8 to the left and add the first byte:

What could possibly go wrong?

It turned out quite a bit. The code was giving me completely wrong results. So I used BitConverter.ToUInt16 and indeed the values returned were entirely different than mine. I checked the binary notation via calculator and then it hit me. The innocent looking << operator has lower precedence than + (as confirmed by the documentation). This means my code first performed:

And then shifted data[position + 1] by the resulting number to the left. When I instead rewrote the code as:

Everything was working great again.

The moral of this story is – whenever in doubt, add two keystrokes worth of parentheses. The code will be more understandable to you, other developers and especially to the computer.

PS: I ended up editing the code once more and replaced + by logical OR, which not only shows the intention better but also leaving out the parentheses will, in this case, not have such fatal consequences.