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[Python-Dev] conditional expressions - add parens?

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Wed Mar 8 01:32:20 CET 2006 
Jeremy Hylton wrote:
> Perhaps the solution
> is to require parens around all expressions, a simple consistent rule.

I actually designed a language with that feature once.
It was an exercise in minimality, with hardly anything
built-in -- all the arithmetic operators, etc. were
defined in the language.

A result was that there was no built-in notion of
precedence, and my solution was to require parentheses
around every infix operation. So instead of

   dsq = b * b - 4 * a * c

you would have had to write

   dsq = ((b * b) - ((4 * a) * c))

I never got an implementation working well enough
to find out how much of a disaster this would
have been to use, though. :-)

-- 
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+
University of Canterbury,	   | Carpe post meridiam!          	  |
Christchurch, New Zealand	   | (I'm not a morning person.)          |
greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz	   +--------------------------------------+
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