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To: RikaStrom

Agree completely, and further to the point, a word processor created text paragraph makes matters so much worse. Written with a pencil on a blank piece of paper, the equation would have been more clear with or without the extra parens.


617 posted on 04/14/2011 10:15:10 AM PDT by RinaseaofDs (Does beheading qualify as 'breaking my back', in the Jeffersonian sense of the expression?)
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To: RinaseaofDs
Written with a pencil on a blank piece of paper, the equation would have been more clear with or without the extra parens.

Yes.

But that's not what we have. What we have is two types of people.

The first deals with the typed-in, single-line expression as if it is a crude attempt to represent what they know the actual problem would be if it were written down on paper.

They see the "/" sign and assume it is making everything to its left the numerator and everything to its right the denominator. They regard it as a fraction sign, dividing the expression into two parts.

The other type of people see the typed-in, single-line expression as an input to a programming language or calculator which follows standard accepted syntax rules and the standard accepted order of operations.

So, it really boils down to whether people think the given expression is written by someone who knows how to program or not.

As the t-shirt says, there are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who do not.

649 posted on 04/14/2011 1:47:07 PM PDT by SoothingDave
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