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Posted by mighty-fine 12/22/2025

Inverse Parentheses(kellett.im)
73 points | 64 commentspage 3
tromp 12/22/2025|
Using Brave on MacOS, I cannot scroll the page to see the entire text. On Firefox, it scrolls fine.
guessmyname 12/22/2025||
Same in Safari. It has something to do with the

  :root {
    […]
    overflow: hidden scroll;
    container-type: size;
    […]
  }
in the main CSS file: https://kellett.im/theme/main.css
TerraHertz 12/22/2025|||
Splendid. Someone found a way to break Browser Scrolling. (Firefox 115.16 for Win7)

Well done.

auggierose 12/22/2025||
Cannot scroll on Safari on macOS, either. What also doesn't work is making the font smaller / larger.
calmbonsai 12/22/2025||
The singular for parenthesis is paren.
ChanderG 12/22/2025||
Opened this excitedly, thinking I was going to get something related to S-expressions/Lisp, was disappointed...
randyrand 12/22/2025||
The core idea: normally, parentheses strengthen grouping:

1 + (2 * 3) forces 2 * 3 to happen first.

Without them, operator precedence decides. The post asks a deliberately strange question:

What if parentheses did the opposite — instead of grouping things tighter, they made them bind less tightly?

HansP958 12/22/2025|
The concept of "inverse parentheses" that unbundle operators is brilliant! The tokenizer hack (friendliness score by parenthesis depth, inspired by Python INDENT/DEDENT) + precedence climbing for infinite levels is elegant – parsing solved without convoluted recursive grammar. kellett

I love the twist: reversing the friendly levels gives you a classic parser, and it opens up crazy experiments like whitespace weakening. Have you tested it on non-arithmetic ops (logical/bitwise) or more complex expressions like ((()))?

istjohn 12/22/2025||
It's not just brilliant, it's earth-shattering.
codegladiator 12/22/2025||
llm generated comment
NetMageSCW 12/22/2025||
I am sure your comment is almost always wrong whenever you use it.