[perl #127391] possible inconsistency in "perlop" documentation onassociativity of operators

On Mon Feb 01 09:29:42 2016, zefram@fysh.org wrote:
> Wolf-Dietrich Moeller wrote:
> >Do I understand you correctly, that you imply that the existing text
> >in the perlop-documentation is wrong for the combined operators with
> >short-circuit operations (&&=, ||= and //=), where not all operands are
> >evaluated by the operator?
> 
> Ah yes, the text you quote (and the preceding paragraph about precedence)
> is indeed incorrect for short-circuiting operators.
> 
> >Should this text instead be adapted to refer to "grouping" instead of
> >"evaluation", or should there be an additional sentence catering for
> >the special case of combined operators with short-circuit behaviour?
> 
> I'd rather not treat short-circuiting as a special case, because it's not,
> for this purpose.  If anything the special case is the simple operators,
> and that's probably worth bringing out explicitly.  I suggest those two
> paragraphs should become
> 
>     I<Operator precedence> means some operators group more tightly than
>     others.  For example, in C<2 + 4 * 5>, the multiplication has higher
>     precedence, so C<4 * 5> is grouped together as the right-hand operand
>     of the addition, rather than C<2 + 4> being grouped together as the
>     left-hand operand of the multiplication.  It is as if the expression
>     were written C<2 + (4 * 5)>, not C<(2 + 4) * 5>.  So the expression
>     yields C<2 + 20 == 22>, rather than C<6 * 5 == 30>.
> 
>     I<Operator associativity> defines what happens if a sequence of the
>     same operators is used one after another: whether they will be grouped
>     at the left or the right.  For example, in C<9 - 3 - 2>, subtraction
>     is left associative, so C<9 - 3> is grouped together as the left-hand
>     operand of the second subtraction, rather than C<3 - 2> being grouped
>     together as the right-hand operand of the first subtraction.  It is
>     as if the expression were written C<(9 - 3) - 2>, not C<9 - (3 - 2)>.
>     So the expression yields C<6 - 2 == 4>, rather than C<9 - 1 == 8>.
> 
>     For simple operators that evaluate all their operands and then
>     combine the values in some way, precedence and associativity (and
>     parentheses) imply some ordering requirements on those combining
>     operations.  For example, in C<2 + 4 * 5>, the grouping implied by
>     precedence means that the multiplication of 4 and 5 must be performed
>     before the addition of 2 and 20, simply because the result of that
>     multiplication is required as one of the operands of the addition.
>     But the order of operations is not fully determined by this: in C<2 *
>     2 + 4 * 5> both multiplications must be performed before the addition,
>     but the grouping does not say anything about the order in which the
>     two multiplications are performed.  In fact Perl has a general rule
>     that the operands of an operator are evaluated in left-to-right order.
>     A few operators such as C<&&=> have special evaluation rules that
>     can result in an operand not being evaluated at all; in general, the
>     top-level operator in an expression has control of operand evaluation.
> 
> -zefram
> 

In order to move this ticket toward resolution I've formatted Zefram's recommendation into a patch attached to this ticket.

Please discuss so that we know whether we want to apply this in 5.25.1.

Thank you very much.

-- 
James E Keenan (jkeenan@cpan.org)

---
via perlbug:  queue: perl5 status: open
https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=127391

• [perl #127391] possible inconsistency in "perlop" documentation onassociativity of operators by James E Keenan via RT
• Re: [perl #127391] possible inconsistency in "perlop" documentationon associativity of operators by demerphq