Comment

An Unprecedented Moment: The Washington National Cathedral Denounces Donald Trump: "Have We No Decency?"

308
Nerdy Fish7/31/2019 4:57:31 pm PDT

re: #297 EPR-radar

Exactly. In fact, if I were doing technical editing for a living, I’d reject any equations with ambiguous division like this.

The reason the same issue doesn’t show up for subtraction is that something like this
a + b - c + d
is always interpreted as a + b + (-c) + d, and then there’s no way to get to a different result by adding in different orders.

To be fair, though, you can write x / y * z as x * (1 / y) * z, which is how you apply the left-to-right rule to multiplication and division.