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What is the underlying concept due to which we prioritize one operator over the other? Is it just a convention?

Chaitanya Baranwal
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  • Yes, it is just convention. If we didn't have such, we would have to put brackets every time we use different operators since otherwise it would be unclear what the expression evaluates to. – Staki42 Sep 16 '17 at 18:24

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it's partly convention, so that we can communicate math without ambiguity. take something like 1+2*3/4-5 without operator precedence like PEDMAS(bodmas or pemdas, depending on how you learned it, noting that multiplication and division are on the same level and so are addition and subtraction) this has a possibility of 24 different answers some include:

  • 3*3/4-5 = 9/4-5 = 9/(-1) = -9
  • 1+6/4-5 = 7/4-5 = 7/(-1) = -7

etc.