According to perldoc perlop, terms have the highest precedence of everything:

A TERM has the highest precedence in Perl. They include variables, quote and quote-like operators, any expression in parentheses ...

Please consider the following code.

use 5.010;
sub apple  { say "apple"  }
sub banana { say "banana" }
sub cherry { say "cherry" }

apple && (banana || cherry)

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Given that expressions in parentheses have topmost priority, one would expect Perl to evaluate (banana || cherry) first, which would boil down to say "banana" which would return 1, and only then to evaluate apple && (1).

So the output I more or less expected is:

banana
apple

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However, the output I get is:

apple
banana

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Please shed some light on this. Why isn't the parenthesed expression evaluated first? I understand the short circuiting nature of the logical operators — for one, this explains why cherry isn't outputted at all, but I fail to understand how && seems to have higher precedence than ( EXPR ), despite the information in the documentation.

In reply to Operator precedence by muba

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