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Comment by tw000001 | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't matter since both multiplication and division are...commutative? Don't remember the terminology but (10x2)/4 == 10x(2/4) == 5

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It matters here because he is using ln, and we don't know if we should stop at the first right parenthesis or the second.

The word you are looking for is associative.

Ooof, thanks for that. I didn't realize that was the natural log function because of the space. My brain was parsing it as the word "In" and essentially ignoring it.

There shouldn't be a space IMO, reading it out of context I couldn't see what the issue was either as I too was not parsing the ln as log_e.

    ln x

    ln(x)

but not

    ln (x)

ln(5) * 10 / 2 ~= 8.047

ln(5 * 10 / 2) ~= 3.219

So it does matter.

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