> It's not operator precedence—that's a separate issue > It's even mnemonic—when the increment symbol goes before the thing being incremented, the increment ha

> It's not operator precedence—that's a separate issue > It's even mnemonic—when the increment symbol goes before the thing being incremented, the increment happens first; else after—but even if not, it's a fairly basic language feature. I think you missed the issue. This is 100% about operator precedence, and has nothing to do with the decrement operator being in front of or behind the variable. This expression: *stack-- means either this: (*stack)-- or this: *(stack--) depending on the operator precedence rules. If this is the layout of memory: ~~~~~~ stack-1: | 52 | stack: | 23 | stack+1: | 19 | ~~~~~~ (* stack)-- evaluates to 22, while *(stack--) evaluates to 52. https://godbolt.org/z/P7Ghfc https://godbolt.org/z/P7Ghfc