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

Joe Smith unknown_kev_cat at hotmail.com
Sun Mar 12 05:50:06 CET 2006

"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

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