Unary minus precedence preference
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07-23-2014, 07:59 PM
Post: #17
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RE: Unary minus precedence preference
(07-23-2014 01:45 PM)Claudio L. Wrote: Finally, a well funded response. So one good reason to choose -2^2=-4 is to avoid unnecessary parenthesis and the ambiguity of: I completely agree with you, but let me play devil's advocate here. One could argue that if -2^2=4, it would avoid the unnecessary parentheses in (-2)^2. Similarly, one could argue that -x^2 + x turned around is actually x + -x^2 which doesn't avoid the ambiguity. My point is simply that it really boils down to convention. Never-the-less, I'm going to use your example in class next time as a way of convincing students that the standard convention makes sense. :-) |
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