The real cause of the Ruby problem in the article is the automatic conversion of "1" to "true". This is a language design bug, and has nothing to do with assoc

The real cause of the Ruby problem in the article is the automatic conversion of "1" to "true". This is a language design bug, and has nothing to do with associativity. As for associativity proper, I program in multiple languages all the time, but find remembering the various associativity rule differences in these languages a pain in the ass. So I always use parenthesis. That way anyone reading my code (including myself a few months later) will find it easy to understand what I intended, and the right thing gets done no matter what the associativity rules are.