this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 43 points 19 hours ago (5 children)

I got some people really angry at me when I suggested writing some math expression with parenthesis so it would be clearer. I think someone told me that order of operations is like a natural law and not a convention, and thus everyone should know it or be able to figure it out.

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 4 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

I got really angry because the prettier code formatter insists on removing parentheses, making things less clear. Because it's an "opinionated" formatter you can't tell it not to do that without using ugly hacks.

Sure, logically there are times when you don't need them. But, often it helps to explain what's happening in the code when you can use parentheses to group certain things. It helps in particular when you want to use "&&" and "||" to say "do X only if Y fails".

[–] jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 5 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

I think you can do // prettier-ignore, because I remember facing that exact situation.

https://prettier.io/docs/ignore/

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 2 points 9 hours ago

I've done that, but that's ugly.

[–] stray@pawb.social 15 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

I sometimes like to add unnecessary parentheses or brackets to section things off and improve legibility, but I don't do any math stuff collaboratively, so I have no idea whether others would find that disruptive or helpful.

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[–] Alaknar@sopuli.xyz 10 points 16 hours ago

I mean, there are very few ambiguous cases when you know how the order of operations works.

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[–] brown567@sh.itjust.works 36 points 18 hours ago (10 children)

2 5 8 5 - × + for you RPN fans =)

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[–] Xylight@feddit.online 8 points 15 hours ago

My dumbahh did 2+5 like it was in parentheses and got 21

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