this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2025
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Hopefully you can see where their confusion might come from, though. PEMDAS is more P-E-MD-AS. If you have a bunch of unparenthesized addition and subtraction, left to right is correct. A lot of like, firstgrader math problems are just basic problems that are usually left to right (but should have some extras to highlight PEMDAS somewhere I'd hope).
So they're mostly telling you they only remember as much math as a small child that barely passed math exercizes.
If you have a bunch of unparenthesized addition and subtraction, left to right doesn't matter.
1 + 2 + 3 = 3 + 2 + 1
True, but as with many things, something has to be the rule for processing it. For many teachers as I've heard, order of appearance is 'the rule' when commutative properties apply. ... at least until algebra demands simplification, but that's a different topic.
Well the rule is: any order goes. Summation is commutative.
No, you completely misunderstood my point. My point is not to describe all valid interpretations of the commutative property, but the one most slow kids will hear.
OFC the actual rule is the order doesn't matter, but kids that don't pick up on the nuance of the commutative property will still remember, "order of appearance is fine".
Yes thank you! If you have a sum it is really great to order it in a way that makes it better to ad in your head and i think that lots of people do that without thinking about it. X=2+3+1+6+2+4+7+5 X=2+3+5+4+6+7+1+2 X=5+5 + 10 +7+1+2 X=10 + 10 + 7+3 X=10 + 10 + 10
Right, because 1-2-3=3-2-1.
You flipped the sign on the 3 and 1.
I did not flip any signs, merely reversed the order in which the operations are written out. If you read the right side from right to left, it has the same meaning as the left side from left to right.
Hell, the convention that the sign is on the left is also just a convention, as is the idea that the smallest digit is on the right (which should be a familiar issue to programmers, if you look up big endian vs little endian)
PE(MD)(AS)
Now just remember to account for those parentheses first...
Huh I just remembered the orders of arithmetic but parentheses trump all so do them first (I use them in even the calculator app). Mean I assume that's that that says but never learned that acronym is all. Now figuring out categories of words;really does my noodle in sometimes. Cause some words can be either depending on context. Math when it's written out has (mostly) the same answer. I say mostly because somewhere in the back of my brain there are some scenarios where something more complicated than straight arithmetic can come out oddly but written as such should come out the same.