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Thanks all!! I get it now

It helped to have a number of different explanations, thanks
for taking the time to post. Much appreciated.

Cheers,
Esmail

On 11/30/2009 12:38 PM, Esmail wrote:
> Thanks all!! I get it now
>
> It helped to have a number of different explanations, thanks
> for taking the time to post. Much appreciated.

I generally do not expect operator precedence to be reliable at all
except for:

+ - (binary ops, not the unary)
* /
**

for other operators I would have explicit parens. It's too much work to
remember the rest of the precedence sheet.

Lie Ryan wrote:
> On 11/30/2009 12:38 PM, Esmail wrote:
>> Thanks all!! I get it now
>>
>> It helped to have a number of different explanations, thanks
>> for taking the time to post. Much appreciated.
>
> I generally do not expect operator precedence to be reliable at all
> except for:
>
> + - (binary ops, not the unary)
> * /
> **
>
> for other operators I would have explicit parens. It's too much work to
> remember the rest of the precedence sheet.

Most programming languages don't differentiate in text between the
number "negative 3" and the expression "negated 3". APL does. The former
is written as "¯3" (3 preceded by the overscore character) and the
latter as "-3" (3 preceded by the minus sign).

In article <>,
Ben Finney <ben+> wrote:
>Lie Ryan <> writes:
>
>> I generally do not expect operator precedence to be reliable at all
>
>Have another read of the thread. The OP's confusion was not over
>operator precedence, but over how names resolve to values in
>expressions.

Operator precedence comes naturally into this matter.
For example, in algol 68 -3**2 is parsed as
(-3)**2
because of the simple rule that all unary operators have precedence
over all binary operators.

(It is a good rule, and this is about the only way to get a
somewhat surprising result. Unary operators -- as long as they
are always put up front -- need not have
a precedence among themselves, so with this rule they don't
need a precedence full stop. )

>Ben Finney

Groetjes Albert

--
--
Albert van der Horst, UTRECHT,THE NETHERLANDS
Economic growth -- being exponential -- ultimately falters.
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