Richard Harnden <richard.nospam@gmail.invalid> writes:Actual examples of too many parentheses?
just write complex expressions in a way that a human can mostUnfortunately, (1) different people have different ideas of what
easily understand,
writing is most easily understood, and (2) different readers have
different notions of which writings are easily understood, and
which writings are not so easily understood. To make things
worse "easily understood" is not a boolean condition, nor is it
necessarily well-ordered -- "most easily understood" isn't always
a well-defined quality, even for a given audience.
Sadly the idea of writing in a way that is "most easily understood"
has resulted in a race to the bottom, where writers are more and
more encouraged to take the view that (some) readers are pretty
much arbitrarily stupid, with the result that expressions become
littered with scads of unnecessary parentheses that actually
detract from ease of reading. Good writing is always a balance
between too much and too little.
I don't think they are needed for the three main groups (unless you need to override the normal behaviour):
* Arithmetic ops that everyone knows
* Comparison ops which can be considered a single level
(in C there are two, but they are rarely chained)
* Logical AND/OR ops
Most involved in coding should know the order of these groups and will know that AND takes precedence over OR because that is common.
The leaves the following which are not used in the real world and which are diverse across languages:
<< >> & | ^
There it makes sense to use parentheses to make things clear when any of these appear, but only if there is more than one and they are mixed.
I don't think that is particularly onerous to have to write, or too much clutter to read.
I wouldn't call anyone stupid for using () in such cases; more pragmatic.
There are some odd ones such as "." (not even considered a binary operator in some languages), and assignment, but these also commonly behave the same way across languages.
And then there is ?: :
a > b ? c : d # (a>b)?c:d
a + b ? c : d # (a+b)?c:d
The grouping of the first is probably what is intended. But in the second, the intent might have been (a+b)?c:d, or a+(b?c:c); we don't know for sure that the author didn't make a mistake or we don't know outselves.
Another candidate for parentheses when there are leading or trailing binary ops involved.
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