Re: Order of operations (was: Eigenvalues &/or eigenvectors, anyone?)
Re: Order of operations (was: Eigenvalues &/or eigenvectors, anyone?)
- Subject: Re: Order of operations (was: Eigenvalues &/or eigenvectors, anyone?)
- From: Doug McNutt <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 8 May 2003 09:25:44 -0600
At 20:31 -0700 5/7/03, Michael Kelly wrote:
>
Wow. I am both horrified and intrigued. Is there an actual reason for
>
this, or did some bored Apple tech just decide to change the order of
>
operations to mess with people's minds?
I did file a bug report and it made it up the chain far enough to get a number. The problem is that some professor in some computer science department decided there was something called a "unary minus" operator which is not a subtraction. Back when algebra was taught in high school - remember that? - we learned that a leading minus sign implied a preceding zero.
The only other language I know that has it "wrong" is Microbesoft Excel where it's a unary minus if executed as a worksheet formula but an algebraically correct subtraction if executed as a Visual Basic macro. FORTRAN, BASIC, Gnumeric, AppleWorks, Maple, perl all have it "right". C doesn't have a power operator.
I'm waiting for a bridge to fall down because engineers aren't computer-science savvy. But then statics can involve eigenvectors so it's not likely to be the fault of AppleScript.
Larry Wall briefly discusses the subject in "Programming Perl", O'Reilly, ISBN 0-596-00027-8, page 92.
--
--> There are 10 kinds of people: those who understand binary, and those who don't <--
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