I’m falling for the troll here but I feel compelled to point out that you did NOT read the post I deleted lmao. I deleted it because I posted it before you “responded” to my points. Go check it out, I just restored it.

I should clarify that I haven’t responded to your “points” because there is nothing worth responding to. Your arguments can all be debunked by reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_operations, so I didn’t bother doing it myself.

To avoid any further temptation to respond I will be blocking you. Your absence from my future will be greatly appreciated. I feel that the deleted post is in itself a very good final word to this disappointment of a “conversation” even if it is not entirely accurate. Goodbye.

Parentheses means evaluating the things inside the parentheses you nimrod

Usernames DO NOT check out

I have said why this style of debate is bad in greater detail here: https://lemmy.world/post/39377635/21030374

But to make a pointless effort to address your actual point, yes distribution exists, no it is not a step in PE(MD)(AS). Again, you have not understood my point because you categorically fail to engage with any argument. I don’t think you even understand what it means to do so. I will not respond further to either thread.

Oh, it’s you. I really want to have a good discussion about this, but it is not possible with your debate style. Once again, fragmenting your opponent’s argument into a million partial statements and then responding to those is ineffective for several reasons:

1. You fail to understand the argument your opponent is making, and so you do not learn anything by engaging with it. You must first understand to learn.

2. By divorcing each partial statement from its surrounding context, you are likely to change its meaning, so you are no longer even responding to the meaning of what was said.

3. You are not making a point of your own, which means you are less likely to figure out your own mental model. You are simply stating facts, opinions, or misunderstandings as if they are self-evidently true, without knowing why you believe them to be true.

4. Expanding on point three, it’s very easy to state two contradictory things without realizing it. For example, “No they can’t. The rules are universal” and “It’s only a convention, not a rule, as just proven”.

5. Also expanding on point three, this also makes it hard for people to find the mistakes you’re making and correct them, because mistakes in your mental model are only visible through the statements you choose to make, which are incoherent when taken together. For example, I can see that you don’t fully understand what I mean by “operator precedence”, but this is not obvious from your main point, because you have no main point, because you do not understand what mine is.

6. If your opponent also used this debate style, the argument takes hours and ends up entirely divorced from the initial meaning, completely destroying any hope of having the debate provide any actual value, ie. greater understanding.

Please do not take these as insults; it’s a long shot to fundamentally change someone’s perspective like this in one post, but I would love if you saw the beauty of discussion. To bring it back to your original comment:

Those Brackets don’t matter. I don’t know why people insist it does

Understanding the purpose and methods of debate allows you to understand why people know the brackets matter.

I’m honestly disappointed that you just downvoted and left. Challenging your beliefs with contrary ideas is the only way to improve them and understand the world in a more comprehensive and accurate way.

Uh, no. I don’t think you’ve thought this through, or you’re just using (AS) without realizing it. Conversations around operator precedence can cause real differences in how expressions are evaluated and if you think everyone else is just being pedantic or is confused then you might not underatand it yourself.

Take for example the expression 3-2+1.

With (AS), 3-2+1 = (3-2)+1 = 1+1 = 2. This is what you would expect, since we do generally agree to evaluate addition and subtraction with the same precedence left-to-right.

With SA, the evaluation is the same, and you get the same answer. No issue there for this expression.

But with AS, 3-2+1 = 3-(2+1) = 3-3 = 0. So evaluating addition with higher precedence rather than equal precedence yields a different answer.

=====

Some other pedantic notes you may find interesting:

There is no “correct answer” to an expression without defining the order of operations on that expression. Addition, subtraction, etc. are mathematical necessities that must work the way they do. But PE(MD)(AS) is something we made up; there is no actual reason why that must be the operator precedence rule we use, and this is what causes issues with communicating about these things. People don’t realize that writing mathematical expressions out using operator symbols and applying PE(MD)(AS) to evaluate that expression is a choice, an arbitrary decision we made, rather than something fundamental like most everything else they were taught in math class. See also Reverse Polish Notation.

Your second example, -1+3+2=4, actually opens up an interesting can of worms. Is negation a different operation than subtraction? You can define it that way. Some people do this, with a smaller, slightly higher subtraction sign before a number indicating negation. Formal definitions sometimes do this too, because operators typically have a set number of arguments, so subtraction is a-b and negation is -c. This avoids issues with expressions starting with a negative number being technically invalid for a two-argument definition of subtraction. Alternatively, you can also define -1 as a single symbol that indicates negative one, not as a negation operation followed by a positive one. These distinctions are for the most part pedantic formalities, but without them you could argue that -1+3+2 evaluated with addition having a higher precedence than subtraction is -(1+3+2) = -6. Defining negation as a separate operation with higher precedence than addition or subtraction, or just saying it’s subtraction and all subtraction has higher prexedence than addition, or saying that -1 is a single symbol, all instead give you your expected answer of 4. Isn’t that interesting?

They do, it’s grouping those operations to say that they have the same precedence. Without them it implies you always do addition before subtraction, for example.

Are you under the impression that atomizing your opponents statements and making a comment about each part individually without addressing the actual point (how those facts fit together) is a good debate tactic? Because it seems like all you’ve done is confuse yourself about what I was saying and make arguments that don’t address it. Never mind that some of those micro-rebuttals aren’t even correct.

Return key? But it works perfectly fine!

Two VSCode sessions are NOT the problem if your system with 32GB of ram is stalling lmao

That guy is the lemmy version of “it’s a cylinder”

Aaaaagggghhhh

But you don’t need to misuse language to assign responsibility. It is their responsibility for breaking the system. Saying the system was always designed for this removes responsibility.

In the past I’ve heard the second opinion primarily from people who say that a system is intended to work in the way that it does. Which makes the statement tautological: The system is working exactly as it works. I find this view unconvincing.

The P in PEMDAS means to solve everything within parentheses first; there is no “distribution” step or rule that says multiplying without a visible operator other than parentheses comes first. So yes, 36 is valid here. It’s mostly because PEMDAS never shows up in the same context as this sort of multiplication or large fractions

PE(MD)(AS)

Now just remember to account for those parentheses first…

Bro doesn’t know how math works

I do this, sometimes it helps reveal a natural pattern when some parts of earlier terms have “disappeared” to simplification

If I had the necessary insight into these fields to make fixing inefficiencies my job I would