Quote:
Originally Posted by redpoint5
But at the same time, orders of operations are such a fundamental concept to math that the overwhelming majority of people should successfully arrive at the correct answer. Since they aren't, it calls into question what the purpose of all that teaching and studying was in the first place.
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At the same time, it brings up what is one of my... well, not daily annoyances, but fairly frequent irritations: when I have to look at other people's code, and they write expressions that depend on order of operations and don't parenthesize. That is, they write the equivalent of "x = 4 x 4 + 4 x 4 + 4 - 4 x 4;" instead of "x = (4 x 4) + (4 x 4) + 4 - (4 x 4)
, but with much more complicated expressions, leaving you to wonder if they really did understand order of expressions as implemented in the compiler.