No, this is a misleading statement of the problem because it tacitly assumes that programmers write arbitrary expressions with almost the same probability, so the rules should accommodate them all, at the same expense. This is patently false, and is a horrible policy for any UI/UX/DevEx/etc. designer. The very existence of linters and static analyzers, hell, even the warnings in the modern compilers about suspicious operator precedence and "this expression doesn't mean what you probably think it does" — all that suggests that some kinds expressions are more probable than others; ergo, those should be accommodated for at the expense of the unlikelier ones. So, the precedence levels and PEMDAS it is, instead of the abstractly-pure, from-the-first-principles, strictly left-to-right order which makes only its inventor, with a very peculiar kind of mind, happy at the expense of most of the actual programmers and users of the language.