Does your DSL little language need operator precedence?

You can ignore precedence in the grammar, and then use a pratt parser or shunting yard or something to parse the precedence.

But yes, it does need it, usually. And it's not a huge thing to implement. I usually implement it in the grammar, with inline node folding inserted for left associative operators, which gets me a very nice clean AST.

Just a single function per level is sufficient for implementing both right and left association. I do not see the problem.

hyperscript has some operator precedence, but within a given general precedence level you have to explicitly parenthesize if you use different operators:

https://github.com/bigskysoftware/_hyperscript/blob/06f9078a...

https://github.com/bigskysoftware/_hyperscript/blob/06f9078a...

this eliminates most practical precendence questions

NB: one thing that may strike people as strange is that the parse methods are on the parse elements themselves, I like to localize everything about a parse element in one place

Yes, but it doesn't need any funny parsing trick to handle them. Just parse the whole statement as a list of expressions joined by operators, and then you can convert the flat list into a precedence-respecting tree with a few lines of code and an operator-to-precedence table.

Not if it's s-expression-based! (laughs in smug lisp weenie)