Exponentiation operator precedence

[Isiah Meadows]

I agree with that completely.

This would also become a gotcha. I can see a lot of people down the road
thinking -x ** 2 === -x**2, only to find that's not the case. It looks like
it should, which will quickly lead to hard to find bugs. I think it's a
terrible idea, but that's just my opinion.

On Fri, Aug 28, 2015, 00:56 Brendan Eich <brendan at mozilla.org> wrote:

> Not to worry, the significant whitespace prospect was (I trust) a
> warding-off spell. Good of Waldemar to mention Fortress, too.
>
> JS, which as source is and will always be minified, indeed requires
> full-parsing minifiers, so one might naively still entertain the stated
> prospect. But it's a bad idea, since people minify (or just tidy by
> removing spaces) by hand. Keep warding off significant space!
>
> /be
>
> Joe Gibbs Politz wrote:
> > On Thu, Aug 27, 2015 at 2:58 PM, Alexander Jones<alex at weej.com>  wrote:
> >> Ethan is making my point far better than I did, and I agree completely
> about
> >> the issue of unary operators visually appearing more tightly bound than
> >> binary operators.
> >>
> >> At this point it seems fair to at least acknowledge the prospect of
> >> significant whitespace.
> >>
> >> ```
> >> -x**2 === -(x ** 2)
> >> -x ** 2 === (-x) ** 2
> >> ```
> >
> > One kind of cost that I haven't seen mentioned (and is relevant
> > re:whitespace) is the impact on minifiers and other tools that use JS
> > as output, which have to deal with operator precedence/whitespace
> > rules in quite complicated ways.  There's a nice recent piece about
> > precedence bugs in a minifier:
> >
> > https://zyan.scripts.mit.edu/blog/backdooring-js/
> >
> > Making the creation and maintenance of systems like minifiers harder
> > is a real cost worth bearing in mind when updating already-subtle
> > existing rules.
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