• marcos@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      Some people insist there’s no “correct” order for the basic arithmetic operations. And worse, some people insist the correct order is parenthesis first, then left to right.

      Both of those sets of people are wrong.

      • MotoAsh@piefed.social
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        9 days ago

        Hopefully you can see where their confusion might come from, though. PEMDAS is more P-E-MD-AS. If you have a bunch of unparenthesized addition and subtraction, left to right is correct. A lot of like, firstgrader math problems are just basic problems that are usually left to right (but should have some extras to highlight PEMDAS somewhere I’d hope).

        So they’re mostly telling you they only remember as much math as a small child that barely passed math exercizes.

        • DefederateLemmyMl@feddit.nl
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          9 days ago

          If you have a bunch of unparenthesized addition and subtraction, left to right is correct

          If you have a bunch of unparenthesized addition and subtraction, left to right doesn’t matter.

          1 + 2 + 3 = 3 + 2 + 1

          • KubeRoot@discuss.tchncs.de
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            8 days ago

            If you have a bunch of unparenthesized addition and subtraction, left to right doesn’t matter.

            Right, because 1-2-3=3-2-1.

              • KubeRoot@discuss.tchncs.de
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                7 days ago

                I did not flip any signs, merely reversed the order in which the operations are written out. If you read the right side from right to left, it has the same meaning as the left side from left to right.

                Hell, the convention that the sign is on the left is also just a convention, as is the idea that the smallest digit is on the right (which should be a familiar issue to programmers, if you look up big endian vs little endian)

                • howrar@lemmy.ca
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                  2 days ago

                  If that’s your idea of reversing the order, then you’re not talking about the same thing as SpaceCadet@feddit.nl. They’re talking about the order of operations and the associativity/commutativity property. You’re talking about the order of the symbols.