6.10.4 The Parentheses

ISO C is often erroneously described as honoring parentheses or evaluating according to parentheses due to an incomplete understanding or an inaccurate presentation.

Since ISO C expressions simply have the grouping specified by their parsing, parentheses still only serve as a way of controlling how an expression is parsed; the natural precedence and associativity of expressions carry exactly the same weight as parentheses.

The above expression could have been written as:

i = (((*(++p)) + f()) + g());

with no different effect on its grouping or evaluation.