Tom, I will have to disagree with you on this: On Tue, Apr 9, 2013 at 7:37 AM, Tom Cakalic <[email protected]> wrote: > However the question/problem seems rather academic.
Well, no. > I haven't needed to or tried to remember the order of operations much > past high school. Good for you. I wonder though if this requires any generalization. > At 52 years old, I see the implicit wisdom in using parentheses to > denote the proper order. Why leave the correct solution to chance when > one could explicitly specify it? Is it really too hard to do so? > Especially if one desires the correct result? I never thought that mathematics (except things such as probability or statistics) leaves anything to chance. > Even in programming, I don't take shortcuts when some languages allow > an implicit variable length of 1. Specificity is preferred to > ambiguity, IMO. > > My 2/1 cents worth. That's right. As programmer I am often in need to write code in a way that could be easy to read/modify after me. However IMO this does not apply to basic math. Here is an example that has certain degree of absurd in it. What if google (microsoft, etc) came up with the system that will make it so that all texts on the internet would have each and every word turned to a link pointing to the respective wikipedia article. It is just so that any reader, no matter how much lacking in knowledge would be able to comprehend the meaning... Obviously this is rather silly or even stupid example. It won't stand the test of recursion. My point however is that things such as this formula (by the way as far as I understand, this is not equation, as it contains no unknown to be determined) belong to very basic human literacy of today. Hence, in fact, it shouldn't be subject to discussion all together - everyone should be able to simply read it and see the result. That's merely my own opinion and should be treated as such. Boris -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
