On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 12:03 PM, Larry Wall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 11:00:09AM -0700, Jon Lang wrote: > > : all unary operators, be they prefix or postfix, should be evaluated > : before any binary operator is. > > And leaving the pool of voting mathematicians out of it for the moment, > how would you parse these: > > sleep $then - $now > not $a eq $b > say $a ~ $b > abs $x**3
Those don't strike me as being unary operators; they strike me as being function calls that have left out the parentheses. Probably because they're alphanumeric rather than symbolic in form. > These all work only because unaries can be looser than binaries. > And Perl 5 programmers will all expect them to work, in addition to > -$a**2 returning a negative value. True enough. Perhaps I should have said "as a rule of thumb..." > And we have to deal with unary > precedence anyway, or !%seen{$key}++ doesn't work right... > > Larry > -- Jonathan "Dataweaver" Lang