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Dwayne Reid <dwayner@planet.eon.net> writes:
> Regardless, I fall upon the old mnemonic phrase for order of math=20
> operations that my Maths teacher gave to me way back in grade school:=20
> BOMDAS =3D Brackets, then Odd_Functions, then Multiply, then Divide,=20
> then Add, then Subtract.

This is amusing to read. In the UK, at least, school students are taught
"BODMAS" (where "O" stands for "Other", if I recall correctly). Of
course, since division is just multiplication combined with a (tighter
binding) reciprocal, it shouldn't matter.

The problem is that it's hard to know how to make sense of

  1/2/3

(as a pair of quotients, rather than a date, which has its own
problems!)

This doesn't come from problems of operator precedence, but rather from
the fact that "/" isn't associative. Fortunately, people make things
much more obvious when scribbling on paper.

I should say, my immediate interpretation of the above is (1/2)/3, but
I've spent a significant fraction of my life able to program in C, so I
suspect that C/Algol/whatever's heritage has more influence on me than
anything mathematical.

Similar problems arise with 1 - 2 - 3, of course. But (since subtraction
is always written in one dimension?), the (1-2)-3 interpretation seems
pretty much universal.


Rupert

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