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.