Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pekk 4838 days ago
parsing is not the point for people who have to write and understand programs, just the point for a parser. Which is more important?
1 comments

Parsing is actually a big issue for people who have to read and write programs; that's why most languages need complex rules for operator precedence and programmers have to memorize these rules or risk introducing subtle bugs.

In Lisp, you never, ever have to worry about operator precedence because the order of operations is explicit in the syntax; you just start from the most deeply nested parentheses and work outward. I'd say that's a worthy reward for learning to read code in prefix notation.