what aspect of school level “mathematical notation” is so bad as to be brain damage inducing?

▲ cultofmetatron 19 hours ago | parent [-]

probably the arbitrariness of it. PEMDAS is more or less burned into my brain at this point but its basically the qwerty of notations.

▲ pitchlatte 19 hours ago | parent [-]

that’s not even notation though, that’s a rubric for the order of operations.

▲ lioeters 19 hours ago | parent [-]

The need to remember operator precedence is a consequence of the infix notation syntax.

▲ antonvs 18 hours ago | parent [-]

It’s a tradeoff against lots of irritating silly parentheses.

▲ Someone 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Postfix doesn’t need parentheses.

Prefix technically doesn’t need, either, if you avoid functions taking variable number of arguments and have a grammar that can reliably detect function calls (could be hard if you’re allowing higher-order functions)

Even with functions taking a variable number of arguments, you could do it the C way and use the argc, argv trick, giving you

  * 2 + 3 5 6 7 3  ⇒  (* (+ 5 6 7) 3)  ⇒  54

I think you’d have to be a bit of a masochist to do that, though.

That also is why I think varargs functions tend to be rare in bare bones forths. You’d have to write

  5 6 7 3 + 3 2 *

Using custom names for the varargs functions would help for the 2-argument version.

▲ lioeters 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Hence Forth.

	▲	WolfeReader 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
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