this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
539 points (87.8% liked)

Asklemmy

43945 readers
639 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] SmartmanApps@programming.dev -2 points 8 months ago

A computer will convert 2(4) to 2 x 4

Only if that's what the programmer has programmed it to do, which is unfortunately most programmers. The correct conversion is 2(4)=(2x4).

in the 90s that if you had a fancy calculator with parentheses, you could fool it because it didn’t know about implicit association. Your calculator doesn’t know the difference between 2 x (2+2) and 2(2+2), but mathematicians do

Actually it's only in the 90's that some calculators started getting it wrong - prior to that they all gave correct answers.