In a scientific context it’s actually very rare to run into that issue because divisions are mostly written as fractions which will completely mitigate the issue.
The strong implicit multiplication will only cause ambiguity after a division with inline notation. Once you use fractions the ambiguity vanishes.
In practice you also rarely see implicit multiplications between numbers but mostly between variables or variables and their coefficients.
Thank you very much 🫶. No it’s not annoying at all. I’m very grateful not only for the fact that you read the post but also that you took the time to point out issues.
I’m not sure if I’d call it the “scientific” one. I’d actually say that the weak juxtaposition is just the simple one schools use because they don’t want to confuse everyone. Scientist actually use both and make sure to prevent ambiguity. IMHO the main takeaway is that there is no consensus and one has to be careful to not write ambiguous expressions.
In this case it’s actually the absence of sources. I couldn’t find a single credible source that states that ÷ has somehow a different operator priority than / or that :
The only things there are a lot of are social media comments claiming that without any source.
My guess is that this comes from a misunderstanding that the obelus sign is forbidden in a lot of standards. But that’s because it can be confused with other symbols and operations and not because the order of operations is somehow unclear.
It’s not really a calculator engineering problem. If you don’t have time to read the entire blog you should definitely check out the section “But my calculator says…”. It’s actually about order of operations regarding implicit multiplication.
Ooh now I get you, sry. True. But sadly you now know the truth and you have to be careful with the implicit multiplications on your tax forms from now on ;-)
That’s the correct answer if you follow one of the conventions. There are actually two conflicting but equally valid conventions. The blog explains the full story but this math problem is really ambiguous.
Thank you so much for taking the time. I’m also not convinced that APS’s notation is a very good choice but I’m neither american nor a physisist 🤣
I’d love to see how the exceptions work that the APS added, like allowing explicit multiplications on line-breaks, if they still would do the multiplication first, but I couldn’t find a single instance where somebody following the APS notation had line-break inside an expression.
Exactly. With the blog post I try to reach people who already heared that some people say it’s ambiguous but either down understand how, or don’t believe it. I’m not sure if that will work out because people who “already know the only correct answer” probably won’t read a 30min blog post.
I’d really like to know if and how your view on that matter would change once you read the full post. I know it’s very long and a lot of people won’t read it because they “already know” the answer but I’m pretty sure it would shift your perception at least a bit if you find the time to read it.
🤣 I wasn’t even sure if I should post it on lemmy. I mainly wrote it so I can post it under other peoples posts that actually are intended to artificially create drama to hopefully show enough people what the actual problems are with those puzzles.
But I probably am a fool and this is not going anywhere because most people won’t read a 30min article about those math problems :-)