🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <Bxvs9I.L22@mentor.cc.purdue.edu>, hrubin@pop.stat.purdue.edu
(Herman Rubin) wrote:
> What is the correct association in a << b + c?

It associates as  a << (b+c).

> Everyone I showed 
> this to came up with the same answer; but that answer is wrong in C!

Well, considering I NEVER saw the << operator symbol before using C, how
could it be wrong??  I could see people getting it wrong if they think of
the shift left operator as a power operator.  A while ago I played around
with changing the precedence of the C operators, but never found a
different order that I was more comfortable with.  If you really don't like
the precedence rules, and since no one but you will ever, ever try to read
your code, it is fairly trivial to write a preprocessor that inserts the
appropriate parentheses the enforce any precedence rules you wish.  How
would YOU, Herman Rubin, define the precedence rules??  BE EXPLICIT!

> One
> cannot even get the compiler to consider spacing in resolving this.

I'll leave the rebuttal for this to people with more free time on their
hands. :-)

> I 
> would just as soon go the the APL idea, which only distinguishers unary
> and binary.

So, why aren't you using APL??

> It would help if we could get a more complicated set of 
> parentheses,

Adding lots of complexity for negligible, if an, gain is a bad, bad idea.

> or allow explicit temporaries to be used to break up the
> operation stream;

What stops you from doing this now??

> Put one
> precedence for unary operators and another for binary operators, or even
> equate the infix notation x FOO y with !FOO(x,y); those of us who want 
> to use user-defined operators would find this a lot preferable to not
> allowing them at all, even if we had to use parentheses all the time.

Funny, I just don't see you getting along with 2 + 3 * 5 evaluating as 25
instead of 17.  Besides, don't you always complain that LISP has too many
parentheses??  If you really want this stuff, it's fairly simple to write
an infix -> postfix converter for LISP.
___
NEVIN ":-)" LIBER, RISC Porting Specialist/Blue Meanie, Mac System Software
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