Quote:
Originally Posted by winders
Who is making stuff up? It's not like only one person on the planet says the answer is "2". As I have said several times now, which you seem to ignore, there is even debate as to what the correct answer is in the mathematics community. There is no debate that the equation is poorly written and ambiguous.
If the "rules" were as black and white as you want them to be, the equation would not be poorly written or ambiguous at all.
Scott
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I give up, the only reason that there is ambiguity in your or anyone else's mind is that you don't want to adhere to the basics and/or there is a fuzzy understanding of one or more of the basic rules
many of these issues arise solely because of technological limitations, years ago it was the limitations imposed by printing presses and more recently by computer screens, the technology exists but is relatively expensive and not widely distributed, I bought a program called MathType that interfaces with MS Word just to avoid these sorts of issues, nevertheless expressions typed in old fashioned inline type can be consistently evaluated by following the basic rules w/o making up things.
just because something can be made more obvious it does not mean that it was ambiguous to begin w/, It just means that you might have to think a little harder to do the right thing