I will give it a try.

The current outcome seems perfectly logical to me. What result is proposed instead?

@cznic The result is "perfectly logical" but is not great from a readability point of view as mentioned before.

a + b * *p

does seem clearer than

a + b**p

(a**b means a to the power of b in some languages, and we even use that notation in some comments to mean that).

The a + b * *p variant is far less readable for me (and subjectively as ugly as it can get). The distinction between the different precedences of + and * is lost. One more 'visual' rule to learn.

What about a + b*(*p)?

AFAIK so far gofmt without -s modified only whitespace, so adding parens would be a change to that.
However, b*(*p) looks readable to me.

I've thought a bit more about this and decided that this is not worth the special handling.

For one, @cznic 's suggestion is a perfectly good Go solution: If the situation arises and readability is a concern, adding ()'s is the work-around.

Secondly, in the std lib (under GOROOT/src) there appears only a single occurrence of this pattern, and in that case spaces are present. src/runtime/map_test.go:382:26:

    nKeys := int(nBuckets * *runtime.HashLoad)

(I didn't find any occurrences under x/arch, x/build, x/net, x/oauth2, x/review, x/sys, and x/tools).