order of operations - parenetheses

manjuvenamma

Is there a better/different way of indicating the order of operations in a mathematical expression - other than using parentheses?

Number Nine

Why? What's wrong with parentheses?

Mute

Whether it's better or not is up for debate, but

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_notation and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Polish_notation

eumyang

Ah, prefix and postfix notation. I remember when I took an intro to programming class as an undergrad, I had to write a program that converted from prefix/postfix to infix, in Pascal. That was fun.

manjuvenamma

Number Nine! Nothing wrong with brackets. Just curiosity. When I studied OOO when I was kid 40 years ago, I studied different types of brackets and their order of precedence. Now, no one uses all these types of brackets, just ordinary brackets with nesting as needed.

Just curiosity to know if there is an alternate and better way.