dba_afish said:
I mean, parenthetical searching has plenty of uses, particularly when you have more than one set. it also handles wildcarded terms and metatags in ways that are not possible with normal searches.

I wasn't arguing otherwise -- there's just a question about who should be using them and who maybe should be encouraged to master the more basic things first, as with eg. regular expressions.

savageorange said:
I wasn't arguing otherwise -- there's just a question about who should be using them and who maybe should be encouraged to master the more basic things first, as with eg. regular expressions.

it's not like it's a particularly complex idea overall, I mean, we've all been through algebra class.

I feel like the the bit at the end of the Basics section of the cheatsheet does well enough at explaining its functions/use case.

honestly, in this particular case, I think the issue might've been more not understanding exclusion in logical expressions, rather than not understanding grouping, necessarily. it does feel a bit weird that:
x AND NOT y AND NOT z
is identical to:
x AND NOT ( y OR z )
it's just something you learn from experience.