But how could you evolve the order of precedence into something different
than the current standard without breaking old code?
I cannot recall the names of all of the languages I have used. They
included extinct ones like Focal and Coursewriter II. I do not recall any
languages that used the operators "+", "-", and "*" with a different order
of precedence than what is described below, however there were host of other
operators including "^", "**", "#", "\", and some others. The others were
not consistent from language to language as I recall.
I will also say that I know what Mumps will do with the following, but do
not recall what Fortran, Pascal, PL/I, or Basic would do with
2*3/4*5/6
Jim Gray
----- Original Message -----
From: "Greg Woodhouse" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <hardhats-members@lists.sourceforge.net>
Sent: Wednesday, August 17, 2005 11:25 AM
Subject: RE: [Hardhats-members] MUMPS features
Which language are you referring to? Ada? PL/1? Honestly, I don't know
either of those languages, so I couldn't say whether they use a single
level of precedence. Languages I have used include Basic, Visual Basic,
C, C++, Pascal, Object Pascal, MUMPS, Java, Perl, Python, Fortan 77,
Franz LISP and Scheme (I don't claim to remember them all!)
I'll just make one editorial comment: There may indeed be languages
other than MUMPS that do not follow normal operator precedence rules,
but who is using them today? I would think that MUMPS programmers would
be more interested in seeing the language evolve into something that
more people would be willing to adopt.
--- Jim Self <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Gregory wrote:
>In every single language using infix notation (except MUMPS) that
I'm
>familiar with 2 + 3 * 4 = 16, and it is a longstanding convention in
>mathematics that 2 + 3 * 4 is 2 + (3 * 4) not (2 + 3) * 4.
>
>It's not that I can't live with strict left to right evaluation,
it's
>just that it's annoying...really annoying. It's as if someone
decided
>that they would violate a well established convention just for
<insert
>your favorite expletive> of it.
The convention for precedence among operators was NOT well
established among different
programming languages until long after I started using MUMPS which
again was long after it
was decided for MUMPS.
When I was a graduate student studying different programming
languages, some used strict
right-to-left precedence and among languages that offered a per
operator precedence scheme
and a relatively large set of operators, there were many variations
on precedence that I
found impossible to follow without a reference manual or excessive
use of parentheses.
In contrast, MUMPS' left-to-right precedence offered refreshing
simplicity. This is a dead
issue, or should be since it was decided for MUMPS decades ago.
---------------------------------------
Jim Self
Systems Architect, Lead Developer
VMTH Computer Services, UC Davis
(http://www.vmth.ucdavis.edu/us/jaself)
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Gregory Woodhouse <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
"Design quality doesn't ensure success, but design failure can ensure
failure."
--Kent Beck
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