wischi

joined 1 year ago
[–] wischi@programming.dev 5 points 11 months ago (15 children)

I'm not sure if I'd call it the "scientific" one. I'd actually say that the weak juxtaposition is just the simple one schools use because they don't want to confuse everyone. Scientist actually use both and make sure to prevent ambiguity. IMHO the main takeaway is that there is no consensus and one has to be careful to not write ambiguous expressions.

[–] wischi@programming.dev 9 points 11 months ago (2 children)

You should read the part about WolframAlpha in the blog.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=6%2Fxy+where+x%3D2%2C+y%3D3

[–] wischi@programming.dev 8 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (12 children)

In this case it's actually the absence of sources. I couldn't find a single credible source that states that ÷ has somehow a different operator priority than / or that :

The only things there are a lot of are social media comments claiming that without any source.

My guess is that this comes from a misunderstanding that the obelus sign is forbidden in a lot of standards. But that's because it can be confused with other symbols and operations and not because the order of operations is somehow unclear.

[–] wischi@programming.dev 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

This meme is specifically about the implicit multiplication because the article it links to is about that too.

But you are right there are a lot more "viral math" things than just the implicit multiplication problems 🤣

[–] wischi@programming.dev 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

It's not really a calculator engineering problem. If you don't have time to read the entire blog you should definitely check out the section "But my calculator says...". It's actually about order of operations regarding implicit multiplication.

[–] wischi@programming.dev 3 points 11 months ago

Thank you for your kind words, really appreciate it.

[–] wischi@programming.dev 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Ooh now I get you, sry. True. But sadly you now know the truth and you have to be careful with the implicit multiplications on your tax forms from now on ;-)

[–] wischi@programming.dev 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Thank you for reading the post, and thanks for pointing that out. Should be fixed and live in the next few minutes.

Update: Also fixed that sentence. Thank you so much.

[–] wischi@programming.dev 4 points 11 months ago (3 children)

That's the correct answer if you follow one of the conventions. There are actually two conflicting but equally valid conventions. The blog explains the full story but this math problem is really ambiguous.

[–] wischi@programming.dev 7 points 11 months ago (3 children)

What is the correct answer according to the convention you follow?

[–] wischi@programming.dev 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Thank you so much for taking the time. I'm also not convinced that APS's notation is a very good choice but I'm neither american nor a physisist 🤣

I'd love to see how the exceptions work that the APS added, like allowing explicit multiplications on line-breaks, if they still would do the multiplication first, but I couldn't find a single instance where somebody following the APS notation had line-break inside an expression.

[–] wischi@programming.dev 4 points 11 months ago

Oh sry. I'm one of those people who are to stupid to detect sarcasm in text comments, unless it's very obvious. Probably a combination of it actually being a hard problem and me not being a native speaker.

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