Au contraire. Parens indeed do affect the way it’s parsed. It’s only syntactic sugar when the parens aren’t really needed and operator precedence and order of evaluation just so happen to coincide with what the programmer “meant”. And in the latter case you just got lucky, sloppy, but lucky. Many a bug has been attributed to it.
Agreed. I was referring to using parentheses to clarify the order of evaluation of arithmetic operators. Humans need them but the machine is fine without them.
The one I see causing more problems is using complex Boolean logic embedded within IF statements. I used to make my people break them down into multiple individual IF statements.