this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2025
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But that's a bit like saying "If you're going to talk to me, put the adjectives before the nouns," even in Spanish where they come after. Mathematical notation is a language and it has a syntax. Sure, you can decide to ignore that syntax, or insist that people modify their use of it for you, but it's not really a reasonable expectation.
I think this is very stupid for a number of reasons. Why is there an order of operations that supersedes the direction the operations are written in? That’s at best dim witted and at worst deliberately misleading. Grog write left to right. Grog read left to right. Grog do sum left to right.
There is absolutely no reason in the world why anybody should have to know that division comes before subtraction. That’s fucking insane, man. What is the point of writing things down if you’re only going to do them in a set order anyway? May as well have a big jumble of letters and numbers and symbols on the page at that point, like who cares. The whole point of writing things down is to express concepts. Can’t do that with any kind of nuance if you’re going to read it one way anyway, no matter how you write it down. That would be like saying you always pronounce certain letters at the start of words even if they’re in the middle. Completely nuts.
If all people did was simple equations like the one in the OP, you'd probably be right, but math syntax has to deal with all kinds of equations. Your way, I can't write 3x^2–4x+5. Instead, I'd have to write ((((3x)^2)−4)x)+5. That's WAY more obnoxious. It's better to have an unambiguous syntax that covers all the cases and lets me write equations in an more simple form.