Sorry if this is trivial - I am so new to swift, actually I have only looked at the language guide+reference for a few minutes.
As far as I understand a parenthesize
+, * etc are infix operators, and they have a semantic meaning that's different from the comma ,, so the compiler treats it in a different way.
From Types in the Swift book:
If there is only one element inside the parentheses, the type is simply the type of that element. For example, the type of
(Int)isInt, not(Int).
So the type of (2) or (2+4) is simply Int, and the * in (2+4)*5 is
just integer multiplication.