>>43
It's better than in python, because It doesn't have to be a special case in the parser and it works for most, if not all ,transitive binary relations
>>45
What's your point? That's like saying you can't write anything sizeable in python without using indentation.
I prefer not to have to remember some arbitrary precedence rules, you on the other hand do.
Besides, I'm not even sure what your intended use case for that example is
>>43 a <= b is not c in d
Checking with the precedence table at http://docs.python.org/reference/expressions.html, I'd argue that such a statement is ambiguous and therefore Scheme is better as it isn't able to express such a statement