Do not introduce priority rules that destroy symmetry. I remember how much more pleasant the predicate calculus became to work with after we had decided to give con- and disjunction the same binding power and thus to consider p ∧ q ∨ r an ill-formed formula.
> We don’t want to baffle or puzzle our readers, in particular it should be clear what has to be done to check our argument and it should be possible to do so without pencil and paper. This dictates small, explicit steps.
I feel this justifies why I sometimes write code with lots of temporary variables on their own lines: It's a way to break down the problem, to name each thing (especially when it's not a simple method-call to a correctly-named method) and it also makes it easier to verify the behavior with the average line-by-line debugger or line-by-line debugging easier.
In many cases, such temporary local variables have no negative performance impact, being optimized away.
It should be noted that this is not same to using a default order (typically, but not necessarily, left-to-right) in such case. Some languages use a term "non-associative" instead.
