Here's the new build, Insiders... wait for it... wait for it... Is it Windows 10X's upcoming ... Oh. You can change refresh rate of the display Windows Insiders on the bleeding edge Windows 10 dev release channel that hoped to twiddle a knob or switch in the latest Windows 10X iteration had to settle for a drop-down menu for the refresh rate of a given display. The dropdown, emitted in last week's build 20236, is a nice toy for sure, and will be welcomed by those who …
I have not access to Windows, but I might suggest that 2 + 3 might result in the answer 5 immediately. In this case it would be reasonable to multiply 5 * 4. I can imagine many people who would think that way.
It follows the same logic as Excel data conversion. (Please, not the U+2B07)
BODMAS is a convention for written mathematics. At the point where you get a cheap calculator that shows you the "current answer" every time you ender the next operator it is totally ambiguous what it should do because that "current answer" should never have been calculated.
It is fantastic to be smug and say that people who think that way are wrong, but if your goal is to create a tool that works for people then you have also failed. I don't have a good answer except that simple calculators are like excel. They do a job, but most people use them incorrectly and get funky answers they trust.
If you are programming or doing analytical mathematics BODMAS is fine. If you are using a simple calculator, be explicit with brackets. I teach some maths to first year undergrads in our degree. First thing I do is make them do a big ish sum on the calculator and many get it wrong.
I think it is time we taught people to be overly explicit and careful when calculating. Rather than to be smug about being "technically correct" while quoting an anagram of a convention.
When I was taking linear algebra, the professor had a habit of creating these sorts of ambiguities just to see who was paying attention in their notation. One particularly nasty exercise was recreating a proof, where he left ONE parenthesis out of the question on purpose, and he expected us to identify where he left it out, in order to successfully solve it. The caterwauling and moaning was audible when he left us the task. Took me a whole weekend and twenty feet of empty desk to print it out.
Actually, everyone knows that both are correct. An electronic calculator is a running-total device. Perform an operation, get the result, that result becomes the first operand of the next operation, and so on...
More sophisticated electronic calculators had bracket keys to override this behaviour and store results so that you can perform mathematically-correct ordering without mentally juggling the calculation beforehand, but they remained running-total at heart - the brackets managed an expression stack that was popped and evaluated every time you pressed the close-bracket key. When I owned Macs, you could irrevocably confuse the MacOS X calculator by not closing a bracket before typing equals. Nothing would recover it except a re-launch.. I reported it with clear repro, but six years later it was still there, maybe it's still broken. [try it yourself: 17 - ( + 2 × 4 = ]
Microsoft could actually be accused of being wrong in Scientific mode, as many Scientific calculators retained the stack-machine-based running total evaluation; adopting the correct operator precedence is a concession to users. However, while engineering and scientific users might appreciate that concession, financial users are accustomed to the running-total pattern, which is why the standard mode retains that behaviour.
In other words, “Technically Wrong but Actually Useful” beats “Technically Correct But Irritating” every time.
When I sat my exams over 30 years ago, I was using a calculator which respected operator precedence, and other than incredibly the cheap Canon LS-12PC I have not used one without it. I would argue that most people when faced with calculations like 3x£1.17+5x£1.92 actually want the answer £13.11, not £16.3392. There are very few occasions even in financial calculations where operator equivalence makes sense. It is better to understand you want a subtotal (press =) then multiply.
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