{"items": [{"author": "Danner", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/notes/jeff-kaufman/significant-whitespace-in-expressions/479328171212/?comment_id=479335361212", "anchor": "fb-479335361212", "service": "fb", "text": "why would the last 2 be errors? wouldn't you treat the with normal order of operations? and the a + b would be analogous to (a)+(b) which is perfectly fine.", "timestamp": "1294514018"}, {"author": "Danner", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/notes/jeff-kaufman/significant-whitespace-in-expressions/479328171212/?comment_id=479335541212", "anchor": "fb-479335541212", "service": "fb", "text": "oh, and i dislike the idea....but im willing to argue about it.", "timestamp": "1294514043"}, {"author": "Jeff&nbsp;Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/notes/jeff-kaufman/significant-whitespace-in-expressions/479328171212/?comment_id=479336921212", "anchor": "fb-479336921212", "service": "fb", "text": "I'm not sure if they should be errors.  I think they should, the idea being that once you have spaces to easily indicate grouping then something as tricky as a+b*c meaning a+(b*c) -- all with no spaces -- isn't needed any more.  The ones a-b+c and a*b+c are less problematic, though, because they read properly if you just go left to right.  So maybe they should be fine?", "timestamp": "1294514261"}, {"author": "Al", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/notes/jeff-kaufman/significant-whitespace-in-expressions/479328171212/?comment_id=479349541212", "anchor": "fb-479349541212", "service": "fb", "text": "this is why most software shops have a disambiguate clause in their coding standards.  If there is any doubt as to the order of operations; use parentheses.  Design for maintenance outweighs coding for speed of compilation, or even run-time execution speed.", "timestamp": "1294516223"}, {"author": "Al", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/notes/jeff-kaufman/significant-whitespace-in-expressions/479328171212/?comment_id=479380611212", "anchor": "fb-479380611212", "service": "fb", "text": "appropriate to the discussion<br>http://xkcd.com/844/", "timestamp": "1294520471"}, {"author": "David", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/notes/jeff-kaufman/significant-whitespace-in-expressions/479328171212/?comment_id=479407381212", "anchor": "fb-479407381212", "service": "fb", "text": "+1 to what Al said. The real challenge in most coding is to minimise the cognitive burden on authors and maintainers of the code, and that's a delicate balance between hard constraints imposed by the language, and the constraints expressed in coding standards (and lint or similar). The latter are cultural constructs, and are best when based in an understanding of who will use the code. They often don't carry well from one organization to another, e.g. the standards we use at Google would not work well in the research labs I've worked at.<br><br>Obligatory goofy web link: http://en.wikipedia.org/.../Whitespace_%28programming...", "timestamp": "1294523823"}, {"author": "Mac", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/notes/jeff-kaufman/significant-whitespace-in-expressions/479328171212/?comment_id=479709021212", "anchor": "fb-479709021212", "service": "fb", "text": "BODMAS - Google it", "timestamp": "1294587158"}]}