[Edu-sig] Order of operations confusion

[Steven Bird]

2009/3/6 Charles Cossé <ccosse at gmail.com>:
> 82+b*c-51=d-13, and the thing that surprised me was that he didn't
> think it was legal to take 82-51 before having dealt with the b*c term

This relates to a programming task called a "Parsons Problem", shown
to be intermediate in difficulty between the tasks of interpreting
code and writing code.  In a Parsons Problem you see the lines of a
5-10 line program in scrambled order, and have to put them back in the
right order.  In some cases there's a bit of freedom (e.g. result +=
82 and result += -51 could go in either order).

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1404520.1404532

-Steven Bird
http://www.csse.unimelb.edu.au/~sb/