Raymond has an interesting post today about two subtle aspects of C#: how order of evaluation in an expression is specified as strictly left-to-right, and how the rules regarding local shadowing ensure that an identifier has exactly one meaning in a local scope. He makes an educated guess that the reason for these sorts of rules is to “reduce the frequency of a category of subtle bugs“.

I’d like to take this opportunity to both confirm that guess and to expand upon it a bit. Continue reading →