Precedence and Associativity

In the Relevance language, the operator precedence is fairly standard, e.g. multiplication has a higher precedence than addition, so 3+5*2 = 3+(5*2), not (3+5)*2:

Q: 3+5*2
A: 13

Parentheses, as expected, trump the other operators:

Q: (3+5)*2
A: 16

If two operators with the same precedence act on the same object, then a choice is made to associate first with either the left or right object. Addition and subtraction are left-associative, thus, 1+2-3+4 is processed as (((1+2)-3)+4).

Casting is also left-associative, so that ‘3 as string as integer’ is interpreted as (3 as string) as integer:

Q: 3 as string as integer
A: 3
I: singular integer

The following is a list of the language elements, from highest to lowest precedence, including associativity where appropriate:

DescriptionGrammatic ValueAssociativity
parentheses( )
casting operatorasleft
unary operatorexists, not exists, not, -
products*, /, mod, &left
addition+, -left
relations=, !=, <, <=, >, >=
ANDandleft
ORorleft
Tuple,
plural;left

Note there is no associativity listed for a relation, because multiple relation operators cannot appear in the same sub-expression. For example:

Q: 1 is 1 is 1
A: This expression could not be parsed.

Also, the tuple operator (comma) is right associative, but is not listed that way in the table because parentheses can change the association. For example, the first expression below is a triple, but the second is a pair:

Q: (1), (2), (3)
A: 1, 2, 3
Q: (1), (2,(3))
A: 1, ( 2, 3 )