Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen writes: > > Thinking more about this operator precedence issue... What about > > || type:music jimi hendrix or beatles > > If OR had precedence over AND that search would not yield the expected > results...
Yes, but this is actually a phrase search which should be expressed as type:music "jimi hendrix" or beatles > A totally other approach would be to have AND take precedence and use "," to > separate expressions that should be ANDed together. Example: > > || type:music, jimi hendrix or beatles > || type:music, jimi hendrix or beatles, filetype:mp3 or filetype:ogg > > The last example translates to: (type:music) AND ((jimi AND hendrix) OR > beatles) AND (filetype:mp3 OR filetype:ogg) > > I actually kinda like that. It keeps the conventional AND precedence and > allows simple grouping of expressions. If we are going to have any kind of explicit grouping let's use the universal standard for this: bracketing with parenthesis. > > In our case, I think that you are right and that it makes more sense to > > have OR take precedence, this has my vote. > > Are you still of the same opinion? Yes for a simple reason: the natural way that the OR thing gets into searching is through synonyms. That is, you are searching for [beatles AND live] and get to thinking about expanding to [(beatles OR lennon) AND (live OR unplugged)]. This is very common and made easier if OR has precedence. But the decision will always be a split one, there are reasons on each side, you just have to decide something. jfd _______________________________________________ xdg mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg
