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List:       freebsd-chat
Subject:    Re: Advice sought re MS Office compatibility
From:       "Mike Meyer" <mwm-dated-1014528813.4615a8 () mired ! org>
Date:       2002-02-19 5:33:33
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[moved from -questions to -chat]

Peter Ulrich Kruppa <root@pukruppa.de> types:
> On Mon, 18 Feb 2002, Mike Meyer wrote:
> > D. Michael McFarland <dmmcf@uiuc.edu> types:
> > > Word and PowerPoint are necessities, unless I refuse to even pretend
> > > to MS Office compatibility.  No one is yet asking me to use Exel.
> > > (Does it still claim -1^2 == +1?)
> > I don't know, but the bc provided with FreeBSD does:
> >
> > guru% bc
> > bc 1.06
> > Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, 1998, 2000 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
> > This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
> > For details type `warranty'.
> > -1^2
> > 1
> > Because of ambiguities in common mathematical notation,
> There is no ambiguity in (in this) mathematical notation.
> -1^2 = -1
> (-1)^2 = +1

Nope. The first one is ambiguous, because you don't know the
precedence of the negation operator with respect to the power
operator. I'd say the unambiguous parsing you gave was the the most
commonly used of the two choices the ambiguous parsing gives.

> > there's at
> > least one parsing for which it's the right answer.
> So these parsings are wrong.

No, mixing infix, postfix and prefix notations is wrong. Which of the
multitude of ambiguities doing so results in you prefer is just that -
a preference.

	<mike
--
Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org>			http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information.

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