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Order of evaluation of arguments using std::cout

Asked 2011-10-10T20:49:22.033
18

Hi all I stumbled upon this piece of code today and I am confused as to what exactly happens and more particular in what order :

Code :

#include <iostream>

bool foo(double & m)
{
    m = 1.0;
    return true;
}

int main()
{
    double test = 0.0;
    std::cout << "Value of test is : \t" << test << "\tReturn value of function is : " << foo(test) <<  "\tValue of test : " << test << std::endl;
    return 0;
}

The output is :

Value of test is :      1       Return value of function is : 1 Value of test : 0

Seeing this I would assume that somehow the right most argument is printed before the call to the function. So this is right to left evaluation?? During debugging though it seems that the function is called prior to the output which is what I would expect. I am using Win7 and MSVS 2010. Any help is appreciated!

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3

The order of evaluation is unspecified, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequence_point

This is the same situation as the example with the operator+ example:

Consider two functions f() and g(). In C and C++, the + operator is not associated with a sequence point, and therefore in the expression f()+g() it is possible that either f() or g() will be executed first.

answered 2011-10-10T21:02:49.280

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