[swift-evolution] Standard operator precedence

[Xiaodi Wu]

Yes all good points--and very interesting history from Dave. Thanks all.
On Mon, Feb 15, 2016 at 1:47 PM Taras Zakharko <taras.zakharko at uzh.ch>
wrote:

> I think the teacher should just do a better job explaining group theory ;)
> Its perfectly consistent to treat * and & separately, because they de-facto
> interpret their arguments as different types.
>
> — T
>
> On 15 Feb 2016, at 20:17, Xiaodi Wu via swift-evolution <
> swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
>
> Yes, but not enough to claim limited resources needed for pressing
> matters. It's not a feature anyone would clamor for, more a product of the
> foolish consistency hobgoblin. Rationale: it is possible in JavaScript (for
> instance) to evaluate true * true, but not in Swift. [I'm aware that
> implicit casting is taking place in JavaScript, and that the return type
> isn't a Boolean.] It comes into play in exactly one scenario I can think of:
>
> Student: "Why is & a multiplicative operation?"
> Teacher: "Well, because for two bits A and B, A & B == A * B."
> Student: "That's interesting, let me try it with the only type I know that
> represents a single bit of data."
> [At this point the student should, IMO, be able to actually evaluate A * B
> where A and B are booleans.]
>
> Analogous rationale for defining &+ and &- on booleans.
>
> On Mon, Feb 15, 2016 at 12:20 PM Chris Lattner <clattner at apple.com> wrote:
>
>> On Feb 14, 2016, at 10:25 AM, Xiaodi Wu <xiaodi.wu at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Some further study has been helpful. Am I close to the mark in answering
>> my own question?
>>
>> - Further reading shows that Swift's rationalized operator precedence
>> levels broadly align with those of Erlang and Go. (However, those languages
>> also seem to lack documentation on how they arrived at this set of
>> precedence levels.)
>>
>> - It is quite evident why << is considered exponentiative.
>>
>> - Dennis Ritchie has explained <
>> http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/dmr-on-or.html> why & has lower precedence
>> than == in C, and why in hindsight that is better off changed. This change
>> has been implemented in Swift/Go/Erlang and also in other languages like
>> Python.
>>
>> - & is considered multiplicative because for two bits A and B, A & B == A
>> * B.
>>
>> - ^ and | should have equal precedence to - and +, respectively, by
>> analogous reasoning.
>>
>> - It also happens to be rational for & to have higher precedence than |
>> by analogy with && and ||.
>>
>>
>> Yep, this is all right.
>>
>> It's a bit of a bummer, if this line of reasoning was indeed used in
>> arriving at these operator precedence levels, that Swift will not allow
>> evaluation of true * true (etc.) without casting. I would expect true &
>> true == true * true.
>>
>>
>> I’m not sure what you mean here.  You want multiplication defined on
>> booleans?
>>
>> -Chris
>>
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