There's still the issue of exponentiation being right-associative. Unless ** becomes an operator which behaves differently as to how it would in a high school maths class, we're at an impasse.
That said, ^ is usually the operator used for exponentiation outside programming languages when you need to express an equation in text. It could be made explicit that ** is a variant on 'exponentiation', but then maybe things are deviating from being useful. Thomas > On 27 Aug 2015, at 3:28 AM, Brendan Eich <bren...@mozilla.org> wrote: > > Yehuda Katz cited an acronym taught when he was a wee lad learning algebra: > PEMDAS (Parentheses, Exponentiation, Multiplication/Dviistion, > Addition/Subtraction). Who else learned this? > > There's nothing sacrosanct about binary precedence being generally lower than > unary. Consider the property access operators in JS. But the precedent to > which all cited languages bow is Math and that's what programmers (mostly) > study. I think you are making too much out of the local -x ** y case in light > of this global argument. > > /be > > Mark S. Miller wrote: >> I don't get it. The conflict between >> >> * the history of ** in other languages, >> * the general pattern that unary binds tighter than binary >> >> seems unresolvable. By the first bullet, -2 ** 2 would be -4. By the second, >> it would be 4. Either answer will surprise too many programmers. By >> contrast, no one is confused by either -Math.pow(2, 2) or Math.pow(-2, 2). > _______________________________________________ > es-discuss mailing list > es-discuss@mozilla.org > https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss _______________________________________________ es-discuss mailing list es-discuss@mozilla.org https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
