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SAMDOB – mess up the order of operations

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While I’m on strike, I’m catching up on stuff I’ve made but never posted about here.

At the Talking Maths in Public conference last August, I was talking with Katie Steckles and Kevin Houston about the order of operations. I think that another one of those ambiguously-written sums had gone round Twitter again. I said it would be good to have a tool where you can write an expression, then change the order of operations and see what happens.

So, on the way home, I wrote one! I’ve called it SAMDOB, which is an anagram of BODMAS.

Screenshot of SAMDOB, showing the order of operations BO(DM)(AS) on the expression 2*3/3*2+2, which evaluates to 6
Screenshot showing how with the order of operations BOMD(AS), the expression evaluates to 3
Screenshot showing how with the order of operations BO(AS)(MD), the expression evaluates to 8.

Please have a play with it. I can imagine that this could be useful to people teaching the order of operations in real life. Let me know if you have any suggestions for improvements.

The code is on GitHub.

(will not be published)

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