A few months ago I wanted to add arithmetic parsing to my game's debug console, and went with this approach. While researching the area, I came across this exa

A few months ago I wanted to add arithmetic parsing to my game's debug console, and went with this approach. While researching the area, I came across this exact blog post, and thought it was perfect. It explains things clearly and concisely (without even needing code/pseudocode). Granted, it's a simple algorithm, but this post was just so much nicer than any of the (higher ranked) results that Google gave me. And it has no ads! It made me sad. Years ago, it seemed like Google helped me find lots of nice little pages like this one. It's much harder to find web articles of this quality anymore. Back to this article specifically, I particularly appreciated the "Advanced Usage" section, where it briefly (and clearly!) goes over some useful extensions to the algorithm. These were very much on my mind (since I wanted parentheses and function calls). They are simple extensions to a simple algorithm, but it's nice to have them summarized for you before you dive in. It was a breezy joy to implement (did it even take an hour?). And I can think of other easy ways to extend its capabilities further. This style of arithmetic parsing would be a wonderful thing for beginner programmers to cut their teeth on. It exposes them to a number of important computer/programming ideas, yet is simple to implement while also being directly useful.