From cook@sightpath.com

Sam Tregar <sam@​tregar.com> writes​:

A​: Know these two commandments, and you shall never go astray.

1\) Multiplication binds more tightly than addition\.
2\) Otherwise\, use parentheses\.

That sound nice, but nobody follows those commandments to the
letter. Really, nobody does.

A more practical commandment is​:

  Thou shalt learn the rules of precedence. You're going to need
  to know them eventually, so you might as well learn them now.

M.

From @doughera88

On Wed, 29 Mar 2000, Michael Cook wrote​:

A more practical commandment is​:

Thou shalt learn the rules of precedence. You're going to need
to know them eventually, so you might as well learn them now.

That would make a lot of sense if the rules and notations were absolutely
uniform across all languages, and if the user was a heavy-duty Perl
programmer. Since neither of those is universally true, a many practical
people probably ought to find some comfortable middle ground.

  Andy Dougherty doughera@​lafayette.edu
  Dept. of Physics
  Lafayette College, Easton PA 18042