Is it a bad thing? Or is it different?
I literally spray brackets about because Im not sure of the precedence.
Explicit over implicit is generally regarded as a good thing. Why is there a blind spot when this comes to operator precedence?
I still want to group that to make it obvious 'address + (offset * scale)'
The former technically works but it's less obvious. And that's a dead simple example
'address + offset << scale' is notionally the same but << has a lower precedence in c than + so you get the opposite behaviour so it's better to just bracket it out of habit.
I never find that I'm adding 3 random numbers. I'm adding 2 random numbers to make a meaningful value, then adding another number so a lot of the time I do 'foo + (bar + baz)'
Maybe if you're into pure mathematics you have a different take, but in my experience it's often the case that you end up bracketing most mathmatical operations for readability anyway
The reason APL made that choice (and its descendants followed) is that it had many tens of operators. There’s no intuitive or otherwise accepted order among them. Which means it’s either all parentheses (like you seem to prefer) or a simple rule (left-of-right). There’s basically no other solution.
Forth and Lisp also dropped precedence and associativity rules, each in their own way.