7 ms·
what aspect of school level “mathematical notation” is so bad as to be brain damage inducing?
by pitchlatte 2mo ago
what aspect of school level “mathematical notation” is so bad as to be brain damage inducing?
- cultofmetatron 2mo agoprobably the arbitrariness of it. PEMDAS is more or less burned into my brain at this point but its basically the qwerty of notations.
- pitchlatte 2mo agothat’s not even notation though, that’s a rubric for the order of operations.
- lioeters 2mo agoThe need to remember operator precedence is a consequence of the infix notation syntax.
- antonvs 2mo agoIt’s a tradeoff against lots of irritating silly parentheses.
- lioeters 2mo agoHence Forth.
- WolfeReader 2mo agoclaps
- Someone 2mo agoPostfix doesn’t need parentheses. Prefix technically doesn’t need, either, if you avoid functions taking variable number of arguments and have a grammar that can reliably detect function calls (could be hard if you’re allowing higher-order functions) Even with functions taking a variable number of arguments, you could do it the C way and use the argc, argv trick, giving you * 2 + 3 5 6 7 3 ⇒ (* (+ 5 6 7) 3) ⇒ 54 I think you’d have to be a bit of a masochist to do that, though. That also is why I think varargs functions tend to be rare in bare bones forths. You’d have to write 5 6 7 3 + 3 2 * Using custom names for the varargs functions would help for the 2-argument version.
- pitchlatte 2mo agoi can’t imagine prefix or postfix being easier for most people to understand.