Personal calculators are "dumb" and do not know the orders of operations. They will perform the operations in the order that you type them in, which is incorrect. 6+5 (which equals 11) then divide 11/2, which is 5.5.
However, graphing calculators, computer programming languages, octave, MATLAB, excel, gcalctool, gnumeric, OO spreadsheet, and another more "advanced" calculators know and follow the order of operations [1]. Multiplication and division is performed first, then addition and subtraction. 6+5/2 is evaluated first as 5/2 = 2.5, then 6+2.5 = 8.5. 6+5/2=8.5 is correct, according to the principals of arithmetic. If you want to get 5.5, you need to use parenthesis: (6+5)/2. According to math, we would do 6+5 then divide by 2. I believe it is a known bug in personal calculators that they cannot perform calculations correctly because they do not know order of operations ;-) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_operations -- 6+5/2 =8.5??? https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/466411 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Desktop Bugs, which is subscribed to gcalctool in ubuntu. -- desktop-bugs mailing list desktop-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/desktop-bugs
