Comment by sieve

> The hardest part (IMHO) about getting a simple language running, particularly for beginners, is the “expression”

This is why teaching material should be tailored towards teaching rather than implementing demented stuff from the real world just because it is "there." You can easily implement a parser that ignores precedence and tell the reader that we are using brackets to force precedence instead.

In a real-word parser, you might use something like this[1] or some other home-grown algorithm if you didn't know about it. Doesn't matter as long as the parser works.

[1] Top-Down operator precedence (Pratt) parsing https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2010/01/02/top-down-operator-p...