• MBM@lemmings.world
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      6 months ago

      This one’s perfectly unambiguous without brackets, unlike the 1/2x stuff

      • Ender of Games@sh.itjust.works
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        6 months ago

        Even your “BODMAS” isn’t universal, lots of people learn “PEMDAS” or “BEDMAS”

        At any level of mathematics after elementary school, you never see terrible expressions like this. Well, except for facebook and twitter

        Take for example: 2/2*2 It is 0.5 or 2 depending on order. But if I were anything after high school (I was more complacent in high school, I guess) if someone gave me an arbitrarily solved equation or expression like this, I would be livid and raise hell at them for trying to do that.

          • Ender of Games@sh.itjust.works
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            6 months ago

            Yes, the fundamentals the same, higher orders come first. BUT

            -Multiplication comes before division in some forms, like PEMDAS. In the example I use, this changes the answer.

            -When you apply an operation, you should specify what it is operating on. In all of these acronyms, addition comes before subtraction, but with a different example:

            2 - 2 + 2

            The minus sign only applies to the middle term, by convention. It is the equivalent of “adding negative two”. You can quickly see that this expression is equal to 2.

            But if you use one of these acronyms, you end with this expression evaluating to -2. I would say it is almost universally accepted that 2 is the correct answer, and -2 is incorrect. Basically, all these acronyms end up being useless waste of time.

            I don’t know if I conveyed this the first time, but, as a lover of pure mathematics, this is something that does not have application in life or in study. It’s an utterly useless waste of time. There is never a case where someone give you numbers like this, where it is not clear what order the numbers should be applied in.

            • Multiplication comes before division in some forms, like PEMDAS. In the example I use, this changes the answer

              If you have both multiplication and division then you do them left to right. PEMDAS doesn’t mean multiplication first, nor does BEDMAS mean division first. It’s PE(MD)(AS) and BE(DM)(AS) where the bracketed parts are done left to right.

              you should specify what it is operating on

              Left associativity means it always operates on the following term. i.e. terms are associated with the sign on their left.

              The minus sign only applies to the middle term, by convention

              By the rule of left associativity.

              But if you use one of these acronyms, you end with this expression evaluating to -2

              No it doesn’t. How on Earth did you manage to get -2?

              all these acronyms end up being useless waste of time

              No they’re not, but I don’t know yet where you’re going wrong with them without seeing your working out.

        • Even your “BODMAS” isn’t universal, lots of people learn “PEMDAS” or “BEDMAS”

          The rules are universal, only the mnemonics used to remember the rules are different

          except for facebook and twitter

          … and high school Maths textbooks, and order of operations worksheet generators, and…

          2/2*2 It is 0.5 or 2 depending on order.

          It’s always 2. #MathsIsNeverAmbiguous

      • Leviathan@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        It’s perfectly reasonable to read this as both (40-32)/2 and 40-(32/2) anywhere past basic math.