flamingos-cant

An interactive tragedy.

  • 233 Posts
  • 612 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle






















  • It’s been a hot minute since I’ve had to do any serious maths, but that does roughly line up with what I remember about BODMAS. It’s just intuitively, there’s a difference between - as an infix operator (10 - 5) and - as a prefix (-3). If you where to solve x2 where x = -3, I don’t think you’d say it’s -9.


  • flamingos-cant@feddit.ukOPto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneDemocr(ule)acy
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    5 days ago

    Nope, you can’t assume the - is included in the square if there’s no parenthesis around it. The answer is -9.

    Surely that would mean the answer’s ambiguous, no? The lack of brackets means we can’t know definitively if - is included or not. But separately, I’d argue that -3 represents negative three, not subtract three, and negative three is it’s own distinct number from positive three.