It didn't take long for this thread to derail into the gutter.

When the OP has been sufficiently answered to everyone's satisfaction, it is OK (and fun) to derail. Derail away I say!

Yeah, I remember the good old days before kids got so stupid. We used to sit around the cave calculating logarithms on our fingers and toes. Made my first abacus out of mammoth ivory and sinew. Of course, in those days maths were done from right to left, according to the old Hebrew alphabet. Yup. Nowadays kids can't maths worth a darn... I blame public education and the interwebs...

Allrighty then. It's a party now!


For us, it didn't stop with the fingers and toes. I mean the boys counted their...chin.

I almost fail math every year, it's beyond me but even I know Order of Operation. One of the first things I learned.

That's an advantage men have. We can count to eleven.

Women can count to twelve if they want to ...

But shouldn't women be able to count to twelve?

Wear as I'm gud at nubmers, so I dont kneed wurdz.

Order of operations is a convention that people agreed to use at some time. Other conventions are used in certain contexts. Left to right parsing is not as crazy as it seems. It simplifies parsing and is vastly simpler. Smalltalk uses left to right precendence. Reverse polish notation and stack precedence is also very convenient in some context and is/was quite popular. Order of operations becomes unnecessary if you use prefix notation used in Lisp. If you think about it a little, there are many flaws to our infix notation.

Order of opperations. First you do parethesis, which is PC-1, then you do multiplication/division, which is x11.7, then you do addition/subtraction, which is +100

Maybe with a mirror....

Yes, in a sense. It's not a convention like grammer though that can change with time. Math as we know it does not exist without order of operations...
As I posted above, you do solve from left to right with mathematical equations because multiplication is interchangeable with division just as addition is interchangeable with subtraction. You don't dive into the middle of an equation to solve all of the addition before solving all of the subtraction. You solve them from left to right after PEMD has been satisfied. This is something you see all the time right after people learn PEMDAS... they make a mess of the equation trying to stick with that order.

Everybody Clear? Can we all add 2+2 now?

The OP's question was answered about 5 posts in.

The rest of the thread, well, it served some purpose but not what we want in Skyrim General.