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Re: Maidir le: Octave and Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally


From: Przemek Klosowski
Subject: Re: Maidir le: Octave and Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally
Date: Tue, 31 May 2011 09:57:17 -0400
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.17) Gecko/20110428 Fedora/3.1.10-1.fc14 Lightning/1.0b2 Thunderbird/3.1.10

On 05/30/2011 08:40 PM, clustro wrote:

This is most embarrassing. I am somewhat flummoxed how I was able to get all
the way through engineering school and NOT be forced to reconcile this
fundamental misunderstanding.

Don't feel too bad about this---it's an easy mistake to make, and sometimes it even makes sense. Intuitively, most people would read "1/2 pi" as (1/2)*pi. At the same time, "1 / 2RC" would probably be widely read as 1/(2*pi*R*C). Mathematical notation is just quirky this way.

For another instance, my other favourite numeric tool, 'units', lets you write things like 13 miles / gallon (unambiguous). However, what should happen when you write 240 miles / 13 gallons? It makes less sense to interpret this as (240 miles / 13) * gallons, which would be the strict by the book interpretation. The alternative would be to force people to write 240 miles / (13 gallons), which would complicate the most common case but actually I'd prefer it because the strict rules make complex expressions more predictable.

Bottom line---just use explicit parentheses.


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