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@amor.org