cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Community Tip - You can change your system assigned username to something more personal in your community settings. X

Not only a man, but also Mathcad Prime can be mistaken

ValeryOchkov
24-Ruby IV

Not only a man, but also Mathcad Prime can be mistaken

bug.png

bug-1.png

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Accepted Solutions
LucMeekes
23-Emerald III
(To:qm)

There's no maybe here, it's exactly clear what's going on. In Mathcad (11 or 15) there are two division operators that work exactly the same, but look different. You have : and you have /.

If you change the : to / you immediately understand:

LucMeekes_0-1580835487707.png

The mathcad 15 xmcd sheet can be explored easily, since it is an xml file. In there you will find that for the second case (the lower left expression) the 6 and (8-4) are together surrounded by (implicit) brackets. wheras in the first case there are explicit brackets, only around (8-4).

Advice: do not use : for divisions.

Note that further confusion is possible due to the 6(8-4) wherein 6 could be viewed as a function. In fact you can actually define a function  6 (that is: 6 with a space in front of it, or even a non-printing character) that you can have perform any function you like, thus adding to the confusion.

 

Success!
Luc

 

View solution in original post

8 REPLIES 8
LucMeekes
23-Emerald III
(To:ValeryOchkov)

It gets worse, this is Mathcad 11. Admitted, you have to be persistent to get this, but it's possible:

LucMeekes_0-1580578271132.png

I guess Mathcad 15 will show the same...

 

Luc

I have download your Mathcad 11 sheet and add new operator with the changing a dot to no space!

bug-15.png

 


@LucMeekes wrote:

Admitted, you have to be persistent to get this, but it's possible

Luc

One man complained to police that his neighbors were behaving badly in neighbors house and that all this was visible from the man window.One policeman arrived and saw nothing. Then the man pulled the table to the window, asked the policeman to stand on the table and look again!


 

Hmm, and I thought that the answer to everything would be 42 .... Werner_E_1-1580598454847.gif

 

 

 

Werner_E_0-1580598024675.png

 

 


@Werner_E wrote:

Hmm, and I thought that the answer to everything would be 42 .... Werner_E_1-1580598454847.gif

 

 

 

My example is without cheating!

It is a Prime bug!

 

 


 


@ValeryOchkov wrote:

@Werner_E wrote:

Hmm, and I thought that the answer to everything would be 42 .... Werner_E_1-1580598454847.gif

 

 

 

My example is without cheating!

It is a Prime bug!

 

 


 


I know and it's terrifyingly easy to achieve this effect in Prime. As Luc has shown, it is also possible to do it in Mathcad, but it does require much more effort there and hardly could be done accidently.

We have a lot of bugs in Prime, some of them are already present in Mathcad, too, some are newly introduced.

But IMHO the new symbolic engine (FriCAS) in Prime 6 is significantly more threatening and a much bigger problem in upcoming Prime versions which will not include muPad any more.

qm
6-Contributor
6-Contributor
(To:ValeryOchkov)

Maybe it has to do with multiplication by juxtaposition:

 

Some calculators say 6/2(1+2) = 1 and others say it equals 9 (similarly 8 divided by 2(2+2) can be 1 or 16 depending on the calculator). How did this disagreement on the order of operations come to be? My first PEMDAS video focused on how mathematicians, scientists and engineers interpret ...
LucMeekes
23-Emerald III
(To:qm)

There's no maybe here, it's exactly clear what's going on. In Mathcad (11 or 15) there are two division operators that work exactly the same, but look different. You have : and you have /.

If you change the : to / you immediately understand:

LucMeekes_0-1580835487707.png

The mathcad 15 xmcd sheet can be explored easily, since it is an xml file. In there you will find that for the second case (the lower left expression) the 6 and (8-4) are together surrounded by (implicit) brackets. wheras in the first case there are explicit brackets, only around (8-4).

Advice: do not use : for divisions.

Note that further confusion is possible due to the 6(8-4) wherein 6 could be viewed as a function. In fact you can actually define a function  6 (that is: 6 with a space in front of it, or even a non-printing character) that you can have perform any function you like, thus adding to the confusion.

 

Success!
Luc

 

Top Tags