Kartik Agaram <[email protected]>:
> Rereading http://sourceforge.net/p/readable/wiki/Rationale for the
> case against precedence, it seems the major rationale against operator
> precedence assumes arbitrary infix operators. What if we instead
> restrict the set of infix tokens and give them hardcoded precedence?
> Has this idea come up before?
Absolutely. But the problem with restricting tokens is that anyone can create
a new operator that would be useful in infix position. If I create "equiv?", I
want to be able to use that, e.g., {x equiv? y}. Indeed, people want to be
able to do this:
{x ,op y}
where you do not even know, at compile time, what the operator *is*.
That said, it *would* be possible to support operator precedence for a set of
hardcoded operators, and then require explicit grouping for everything else.
I've even toyed with some possible systems. Things get complicated, though;
there are a lot of options in precedence systems, with a lot of room for
complaint no matter what you choose. And remarkably, after all that work, it's
not clear that it's worth it. And I think that there's a lot to be said for
the simplicity of no-precedence.
In the end, what matters is *adoption*. If people just won't use it without
some precedence support, then clearly it needs discussion. If people won't use
it *if* it has precedence support, well, that needs discussion too :-).
--- David A. Wheeler
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