Bedmas

[Howers]

We all know BEDMAS from grade school: brackets, exponents, division, multiplication, addition, subtraction. My question is, why does multiplication precede addition, and likewise their inverse operations?

[Jarle]

So you would suggest that we make the multiplication before addition, and the inverses of these behind each operation respectively?

How would you pronounce BEASMD?

[Howers]

Thats what we already have, multiplication before addition. I'm not proposing anything, I'm just curious as to why it was decided to be that way.

[Gokul43201]

It purely convention - useful to the reduce work one has to put in the make any expression have only one interpretation.

Further, I'd rather have things this way. I think it's handier to deal with sums of products than products of sums. The latter are rarer (except in some trivial sense); they mean an expression is factorizable into smaller parts.