Comment by jancsika

Note that in your example there appear to be three distinct meanings:

1. prefix incr/decr precedence: "stack[--sp]"

2. postfix incr/decr precedence: "s[j++]"

3. i have no particular preference for the precedence and am just using a shorthand I inherited from my ancestors whose use cases are no longer relevant to me: "i++" in your for loop

My rank speculation is that C programmers get in a habit of #3 and then forget to consider precedence in an expression where it matters.

In any case, it would be interesting to do a scan of github to see how often prefix and suffix incr/decr had to get switched up in a bugfix patch.