Thanks, for reference, this has been already reported as PR#16710. Now
fixed, the precedence of "?" is again lower than the precedence of "=",
as documented in ?Syntax.
Please note the role of the precedence table in the parser definition:
the precedence given there is not necessarily the precedence of
operators you would see in the language. The precedence table in the
parser definition tells the parser how to behave in situations when it
does not know otherwise (please refer to bison documentation if you were
curious about the details), but it "knows otherwise" in R, the grammar
was written so that "=" had the lowest precedence, before the fix. Also,
in principle, the precedence can be different in different contexts.
It is the precedence table in the programming language
definition/specification/documentation (here ?Syntax) that should give
the precedence a user would observe in the language. Following the
table, programmers know when it is safe to omit parentheses. However,
this may be error prone for operators that have different
meaning/precedence in different languages, and hence such tables are
often intentionally incomplete. This is another reason why not to look
into the parser implementation to learn about operator precedence. R's
precedence table in ?Syntax is fairly complete and in many cases using
parentheses where the table gives precedence would improve readability
of the code.
Best
Tomas
On 1/10/20 11:59 AM, Konrad Rudolph wrote:
The documentation (help("Syntax")) gives the operator precedence of the
assignment operators and help, from highest to lowest, as:
‘<- <<-’ assignment (right to left)
‘=’ assignment (right to left)
‘?’ help (unary and binary)
If I understand correctly this implies that `a = b ? c` and `a <- b ? c`
should parse identically. Or, if using the unary version, `?a = b` and `?a
<- b` should parse identically.
However, as noted by Antoine Fabri on Stack Overflow [1], they have
different parses (on R 3.5.3 and 3.6.1, at least), which puts the
precedence of `?` *between* that of `<-` and `=`. In fact, src/main/gram.y
[2] appears to show the same precedence table as the documentation;
presumably the parser at some point rewrites the parse tree manually.
At any rate, should this be fixed in the documentation? Or is the
documentation “correct”, and there’s a bug in the parser (in some versions
of R)?
[1] <
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1741820/51564252#comment105506343_51564252
[2] <
https://github.com/wch/r-source/blob/386c3a93cbcaf95017fa6ae52453530fb95149f4/src/main/gram.y#L384-L390
--
Konrad Rudolph
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