No, those companies aren’t wrong, but they’re not entirely right either. The answer to “6 ÷ 2(1+2)” is 1 on those calculators because that is a badly written equation and you(not literally you, to be clear) should feel bad for writing it, and the calculators can’t handle it with their rigid hardcoded logic. The ones that do give the correct answer of 9 on that equation will get other equations wrong that it shouldn’t be, again because the logic is hardcoded.
That doesn’t change the fact that that equation worked out on paper is absolutely 9 based on modern rules of math. Calculate the parentheses first, you then have 6 ÷ 2(3). We could solve from here, but to make the point extra clear I’m going to actually expand this out to explicit multiplication. “2(3)” is the same as “2 x 3”, so we can rewrite the equation as “6 ÷ 2 x 3”. All operators now inarguably have equal precedence, which means the only factor left in which order to do the operations is left to right, and thus division first. The answer can only be 9.
You lost me on the section when you started going into different calculators, but I read the rest of the post. Well written even if I ultimately disagree!
The reason imo there is ambiguity with these math problems is bad/outdated teaching. The way I was taught pemdas, you always do the left-most operations first, while otherwise still following the ordering.
Doing this for 6÷2(1+2), there is no ambiguity that the answer is 9. You do your parentheses first as always, 6÷2(3), and then since division and multiplication are equal in ordering weight, you do the division first because it’s the left most operation, leaving us 3(3), which is of course 9.
If someone wrote this equation with the intention that the answer is 1, they wrote the equation wrong, simple as that.
6÷2(1+2) (programming.dev)
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