Why is priority of round brackets ignored [duplicate]

This question already has an answer here: Post-increment and Pre-increment concept? 10 answers Consider the following code snippet: #include <iostream> using namespace std; int main() { int x = 10; std::cout << (x++) << std::endl; return 0; } I expect the x++ to be equivalent to ++x as the expression is enclosed by round brackets. And accordingly expect 11 to be printed, but the output is 10. Why? EDIT: I understand that pre and post increment work differently, what I don't understand is that why bracket priority is ignored i.e if I say x = (a +b) * c, I expect a and b to be added first and then multiplied with c, instead of b *c and then addition with a