— hitscanner apologist ⚡
— tired trans woman ⚧️☣
— not always grumpy, she just looks like that 💀
— level/environment designer 🔨
— Current work: Skin Deep (at Blendo Games) 🐈
📍 Adelaide, Australia
Private page (for friends): @garbagegrenade
Me: hey why are all these projectiles ending up slightly lower than they should be?
The interpreter for the id tech 4 map scripting system: oh, well it's because
-spread + 2 * sys.random(spread)
is actually equivalent to
-1 * (spread + 2 * sys.random(spread))
Me: oh, okay
Me: hey, wait a fucking minute
I'm morbidly curious why they decided to have the precedence of the unary minus operator so low.
It's been a while since I've last thought about parsers, but is there some way this simplifies implementation of parsing mixed unary & inline binary operator expresssions? It feels like it shouldn't.
I learned just enough about parsers to pass the unit and haven't really thought about them since, I'm afraid.
I wouldn't put too much stock in there being a well-considered decision behind it. This language has a lot of quirks.
my guess is "operator precedence is hard" combined with "proper unary operator precedence is harder still"
I am reminded of the time I caught a bug in my studio's prototype game where mouse deltas were being calculated as
Position =+ mouseMovement
Instead of
Position += mouseMovement
Unary plus might be one of the most cursed operators. Just hiding there waiting to ruin someone's day.
