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radford-nealtoday at 1:54 PM1 replyview on HN

The notation for avoiding parentheses is interesting, and I've thought that it might be useful in programming languages.

To illustrate, suppose you have a non-associative operator $. Rather than write a$(b$c), you can write a$.b$c - the . makes the $ before it be lower precedence on the right side. More dots make things be even lower precedence.

So, for example,

    a$b .$: x$y .$. p$q
means

    (a$b) $ ((x$y) $ (p$q))
At least, that's my recollection. It's been over fifty years since I read (significant parts of) it...

Replies

layer8today at 3:51 PM

In what way do you think this is useful over parentheses?

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