From owner-freebsd-chat Mon Feb 18 21:33:38 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from mired.org (dsl-64-192-6-133.telocity.com [64.192.6.133]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 871B137B404 for ; Mon, 18 Feb 2002 21:33:34 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 63709 invoked by uid 100); 19 Feb 2002 05:33:33 -0000 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <15473.58285.236545.514222@guru.mired.org> Date: Mon, 18 Feb 2002 23:33:33 -0600 To: Peter Ulrich Kruppa Cc: Mike Meyer , "D. Michael McFarland" , chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Advice sought re MS Office compatibility In-Reply-To: <20020219062359.Q7320-100000@pukruppa.de> References: <15473.46758.516892.756570@guru.mired.org> <20020219062359.Q7320-100000@pukruppa.de> X-Mailer: VM 6.90 under 21.1 (patch 14) "Cuyahoga Valley" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ From: "Mike Meyer" X-Delivery-Agent: TMDA/0.46 (Python 2.2; freebsd-4.5-STABLE-i386) Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org [moved from -questions to -chat] Peter Ulrich Kruppa types: > On Mon, 18 Feb 2002, Mike Meyer wrote: > > D. Michael McFarland 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. http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message