6.5 Expressions

1 Anexpression is a sequence of operators and operands that specifies computation of a
value, or that designates an object or a function, or that generates side effects, or that
performs a combination thereof.
2 Between the previous and next sequence point an object shall have its stored value
modified at most once by the evaluation of an expression. Furthermore, the prior value
shall be read only to determine the value to be stored.70)
3 The grouping of operators and operands is indicated by the syntax.71) Except as specified
later (for the function-call (), &&, ||, ?:, and comma operators), the order of evaluation
of subexpressions and the order in which side effects take place are both unspecified.
4 Some operators (the unary operator ~, and the binary operators <<, >>, &, ^, and |,
collectively described as bitwise operators) are required to have operands that have
integer type. These operators return values that depend on the internal representations of
integers, and have implementation-defined and undefined aspects for signed types.
5 If an exceptional condition occurs during the evaluation of an expression (that is, if the
result is not mathematically defined or not in the range of representable values for its
type), the behavior is undefined.
6 The effective type of an object for an access to its stored value is the declared type of the
object, if any.72) If a value is stored into an object having no declared type through an
lvalue having a type that is not a character type, then the type of the lvalue becomes the
effective type of the object for that access and for subsequent accesses that do not modify

the stored value. If a value is copied into an object having no declared type using
memcpy or memmove, or is copied as an array of character type, then the effective type
of the modified object for that access and for subsequent accesses that do not modify the
value is the effective type of the object from which the value is copied, if it has one. For
all other accesses to an object having no declared type, the effective type of the object is
simply the type of the lvalue used for the access.
7 An object shall have its stored value accessed only by an lvalue expression that has one of
the following types:73)
— a type compatible with the effective type of the object,
— a qualified version of a type compatible with the effective type of the object,
— a type that is the signed or unsigned type corresponding to the effective type of the
object,
— a type that is the signed or unsigned type corresponding to a qualified version of the
effective type of the object,
— an aggregate or union type that includes one of the aforementioned types among its
members (including, recursively, a member of a subaggregate or contained union), or
— a character type.
8 A floating expression may be contracted, that is, evaluated as though it were an atomic
operation, thereby omitting rounding errors implied by the source code and the
expression evaluation method.74) The FP_CONTRACT pragma in <math.h> provides a
way to disallow contracted expressions. Otherwise, whether and how expressions are
contracted is implementation-defined.75)
Forward references: the FP_CONTRACT pragma (7.12.2), copying functions (7.21.2).