memes

Silence descends. @smartmanapps@programming.dev is nowhere to be found. A blissful sense of intelligence and sanity is restored, yet one thread remains loose: why the fuck was I talking about calculators this whole time?

Well, weary traveller to the depths of this rabbit-hole, who probably doesn't exist, let me tie off that loose end. (OK I admit it, I'm just miffed I was never able to bring this back to The Point because Captain Denial over here can't admit a single mistake)

The point is simply this: if a calculator works with some order of operations other than the normal one, so that in the operation of that calculator, 1 + 2 × 4 - 5 ÷ 6 = 1.16, and if this calculator proves useful for the solution of actual problems, there cannot be anything wrong with this set of rules.

Ages ago, Donald tried to claim that some scenario he came up with proved that left-to-right evaluation gave you wrong answers. One only needs to imagine how one would use an immediate execution calculator to tackle such a problem to see that his scenario does nothing of the sort.

So if you need to work out "Alice gave me 3L of juice, then Bob gave me two 5L cartons of juice, how much juice do I have?" You'd write down, with ordinary notation, 3 + 2 × 5 (and get 13), but on an immediate execution calculator you'd have to type in 2 × 5 + 3, but you'd still get the right answer of 13, because you know how to translate the scenario into the correct notation for the context. If you were talking to someone who insisted on ignoring ordinary rules of precedence and just proceeding left-to-right, you could write down the exact same string and they too would get the right answer of 13.