Parenthesis Question

Hi there, jasonj7! Joseph Yhu is spot on. In this case, you've created a condition where the placement of the parentheses don't actually matter. However, there are cases where it does matter and quite a bit. Typically, you see this a lot with conditions that combine the || and the &&.

Take a look at the following example:

let a = 2;
let b = 20;
let c = 30;


if((a == 10 && b == 20) || c == 30) {
  console.log("First condition evaluates to true.");
} else {
  console.log("First condition evaluates to false.");
}

if(a == 10 && (b == 20 || c == 30)) {
  console.log("Second condition evaluates to true.")
} else {
  console.log("Second condition evaluates to false.")
}

The output:

First condition evaluates to true.
Second condition evaluates to false.

They are the same barring the placement of the inner parentheses. I'm not sure if you remember from your math classes learning to do everything in parentheses first. This also goes for nested parentheses. The further in it is, the higher priority. So in the first if statement we start by doing the a==10 && b==20 which evaluates to false. Then we do the "or c is equal to 30" and it is, so it evaluates to true.

In the second example, however, we start with the b == 20 || c==30 part which evaluates to true. Then we ask if a == 10 and the result of b == 20 || c ==30, which evaluates to false. It's about the order in which you want to evaluate the truthiness of something.

Hope this helps!

edited for additional information

The first one would look like this if you follow the evaluation step by step:

(a == 10 && b == 20) || c == 30
false || c == 30
false || true
true

And the second one would look like:

a == 10 && (b == 20 || c == 30)
a == 10 && true
false && true
false