Operator associativity

In programming languages, the associativity (or fixity) of an operator is a property that determines how operators of the same precedence are grouped in the absence of parentheses. If an operand is both preceded and followed by operators (for example, "^ 4 ^"), and those operators have equal precedence, then the operand may be used as input to two different operations (i.e. the two operations indicated by the two operators). The choice of which operations to apply the operand to, is determined by the "associativity" of the operators. Operators may be associative (meaning the operations can be grouped arbitrarily), left-associative (meaning the operations are grouped from the left), right-associative (meaning the operations are grouped from the right) or non-associative (meaning operations cannot be chained, often because the output type is incompatible with the input types). The associativity and precedence of an operator is a part of the definition of the programming language; different programming languages may have different associativity and precedence for the same type of operator.