3 ms·

The author asks why && and || need different precedence (Unless I misunderstood). This is because `a && (b || c)` has a different truth table than `(a && b) ||

• oconnor0 9y ago
  That doesn't explain why they would need a different precedence. `a + b - c` is not the same as `a - b + c` even through the precedence's of + and - are the same (in most syntaxes).
  • pacaro 9y ago
    Granted, the intersection of precedence and associativity is a great source of confusion (and any number of annoying Facebook memes) I'm not a formally trained mathematician, but one way to rationalize + and - having the same precedence, is to consider them as inverses of each other, so your two examples can be written as a + -b + c And a + b + -c At which point precedence and associativity no longer matter. The same can be done with multiplication and division
• rspeele 9y ago
  && having higher precedence than || makes sense because && is boolean multiplication and || is boolean addition.
  • DonaldPShimoda 9y ago
    This makes so much sense but I never thought of it this way before so explicitly. Neat!
  • agumonkey 9y ago
    Has anyone ever found a link between boolean (F2) and "normal" base (F[n], or N) arithmetics ?