[andrewla]

I think our positions are pretty close, I'm just coming around to the idea that any operator precedence at all is of dubious value.

It's nice to write `a + b * c` and have it parsed the "right" way, but I've become fairly comfortable with the idea of getting rid of that. To always require parentheses. I don't think writing `a + (b * c)` is that terrible. `a + b == c` is a little more annoying as `(a + b) == c`.

Where I think the worst cases are is addition/subtraction, since those are so primitive -- subtraction can be thought of as addition of a negation, and in that form it is directly associative with addition. Indexing into arrays with constructs like `x[a + b - 1]` is incredibly common, and here almost any parenthesization makes it look like it has meaning -- if you see code that says `x[(a + b) - 1]`, is that a different intent than `x[a + (b - 1)]`? It feels different to me; `x[(start + offset) - 1]` is an adjustment, but `x[start + (first_comma - 1)]` is finding the location before an offset.

On associativity I think this gets even worse; if you have to parenthesize `a + b + c` then it feels like the language is getting in your way, just by force of habit. Nobody blinks at the idea of deciding between `a b + c +` vs. `a b c + +` in a stack language, so maybe people would just get used to typing `a + (b + c)` and it would just fade into the background.

This is all kind of rambly; my general feeling about computer languages is what I said above -- the harder it is for a machine to parse, the harder it is for a person to read; but some idioms are just so ingrained that it's hard to even recognize that you're making assumptions about associativity; and I venture there's a significant class of programmers who don't know what associativity is in any formal sense but routinely use the property because it's so ingrained in how we are taught to calculate.