[Python-Dev] conditional expressions - add parens? (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Wed Mar 8 01:32:20 CET 2006

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. :-)

-- Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+ University of Canterbury, | Carpe post meridiam! | Christchurch, New Zealand | (I'm not a morning person.) | greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz +--------------------------------------+

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