I have spoken out against such changes in the past (Re: Thoughts on replacing -> with .) because I think that the benefits are overestimated relative to the costs.

Here, only the wizards will be sure they know what they are doing, when they omit the parentheses. And the wizards will know that the x-operator has higher precedence. Changing Perl to the more intuitive way (I admit it would be) will break older code and will be very difficult to spot.

I also think that less parentheses is not automatically cleaner code. Especially, when you have to remember rarely used and recently changed precedence rules.

And lastly, your initial post has already more than 3000 characters, not counting your follow ups, which makes more than 1500 pairs of parentheses you could have typed in your code... ;)


In reply to Re: Precedence design question...'x' & arith by hdb
in thread Precedence design question...'x' & arith by perl-diddler

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