The requirement was 1 statement w/o parens.

Why?

what possible reason could there be for it not to change?

Why would it? To satisfy your personal and unreasonable requirement to avoid typing two characters in what is in itself, a very infrequently used construct.

  1. 10s or 100s of thousands of programmers have written millions of Perl programs without this ever being an issue worthy of messing with the precedence table.

    Why are you having so much of a problem with it?

  2. In every situation where one might do this, there is a better alternative already existing.

    Eg:

    [0] Perl> printf "%*s\n", $_ *2+4, 'fred' for 1 .. 10;;
  fred
    fred
      fred
        fred
          fred
            fred
              fred
                fred
                  fred
                    fred

    [download]
Are you saying Perl is a Dead language?

Certainly not. And throwing straw men into other peoples mouths is a silly tactic.

Are you saying that this change will suddenly make Perl hip again?

Will it make PHP, Javascript, Ruby, Java, Go, Dart, ... programmers abandon their current langauges of choice and flock to Perl's door?

And if they did, would that improve my lot? Or yours?

Why wouldn't it change?

Because even if the change of precedence would alleviate a pair of parens in this one situation without affecting existing statements of a similar type -- and I'm far from convinced you've thought that through thoroughly -- how about the knock on affects of that change of precedence upon numbers and strings in other situations; those not using the x operator. Have you even begun to consider how they will affect existing code?

Unless you're suggesting that the precedence only change for this one specific type of expression -- which would be even sillier.

I strongly hope that this will be dismissed as an idea very quickly. We've had enough ill-thought through language changes over the last few major versions that have subsequently had to be deprecated. We don't need more of the same for such pointless reasons as avoiding a pair of parens.

With the rise and rise of 'Social' network sites: 'Computers are making people easier to use everyday'
Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.
"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".
In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.

In reply to Re^5: Precedence design question...'x' & arith by BrowserUk
in thread Precedence design question...'x' & arith by perl-diddler

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.