Robert Brewer fumanchu at amor.org
Wed Mar 8 02:04:30 CET 2006

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Greg Ewing wrote:
> 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. :-)

I already do that anyway, and even update other people's code in any
open-source projects I contribute to, because I find it *far* easier to
read and write 'unnecessary' parens than remember precedence rules. But
I can understand why some people would balk at it, so +0.5 from me. ;)


Robert Brewer
System Architect
Amor Ministries
fumanchu at amor.org

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