[Python-Dev] conditional expressions - add parens?

[Joe Smith]

"Greg Ewing" <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote in message 
news:440E2614.8050508 at canterbury.ac.nz...
> 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. :-)

Well the original was almost certainly a tongue-in-cheek reference to LISP.
LISP was a disaster to use, so I doubt your language would have been any 
worse.
The way one identifies a lisp programmer is to find the person whose paren 
keys have
worn competely off their keyboard. :D