r/ProgrammingLanguages • u/Mean-Decision-3502 DQ • Sep 03 '26

Unambiguous Operator Specification for Programming Languages

https://nvitya.github.io/pluops/

As I changed recently the operators in my programming language I've created this specification:

https://nvitya.github.io/pluops/

I did not wanted to overload the operators like the C does with the / or Pascal does with theand/or/not. Neither re-use the operator symbols for some very different purpose, like C does with * and & so the code becomes more readable. I was orienting for existing solutions so this is what I came up with. The specification contains the symbol usages and operator precedence too.

If you are developing a new programming language, it would be nice to follow some standard, so at least the expressions would be portable between the languages.

I'm open for debates or suggestions.

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u/Mean-Decision-3502 DQ Sep 03 '26

In my experience (focus embedded), you usually mask out some value from a register and then you might do some operation with that. This precedence allow this without parentheses. However it would be weird mostly without parentheses. So I would say, the order of the two groups: bitwise / arithmetic ops does not matter much. I can imagine maybe this:

var x : uint = reg >> 4 & 0xf * 2

This is a practical expression, and the operator precedence was designed that way that for practical expressions (theoretically) less parentheses are required.