I have gone the other way with the languages I designed, from the system you describe to multifix, and have had the opposite experience. A proper implementation

I have gone the other way with the languages I designed, from the system you describe to multifix, and have had the opposite experience. A proper implementation of general operator precedence grammars is much simpler than implementing prefix, postfix, infix and blocks specifically. Now, I'm not sure how you implemented multifix, but a good general implementation for it is not immediately obvious, so I suspect you simply used an algorithm that's more convoluted than necessary and made you overestimate the scheme's actual complexity. Implemented properly, though, it's ridiculously simple. To demonstrate, I have hacked together a JavaScript version here (sorry, I didn't get around to commenting the code yet): http://jsfiddle.net/ed37wy5k/2/ http://jsfiddle.net/ed37wy5k/2/ The core of the parser is the oparse function, which clocks in at 32 lines of code. Along with a basic tokenizer, order function, evaluator and some fancy display code, the whole thing is barely over 200 LOC. I dug around for XL's source and from what I can tell, what you have is not simpler than this. I also never suggested making multifix operators like multiply_and_add. Multifix is for operators which are inherently ternary, quaternary and so forth. For instance, when I see "a ? b : c" I don't parse it as prefix, postfix or binary infix, I parse it as ternary.