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

Robert Brewer fumanchu at amor.org
Wed Mar 8 02:04:30 CET 2006

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 at amor.org

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