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A comment on Problems of Traditional Math Notation (2004). Parent comment

Re:Problems of Traditional Math Notation (2004) by chongli on Monday November 06, 2017 @08:51AM (#15635362)
For example (|a|)b(|c|) would be instead written |ac|b

That changes the meaning. You're now relying on multiplication being commutative which is not true for all sets.

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Re:Problems of Traditional Math Notation (2004) by thethirdone on Monday November 06, 2017 @12:04PM (#15636849)
> That changes the meaning. You're now relying on multiplication being commutative which is not true for all sets

As I said at the end of my last comment: I don't see a case where the ambiguity would pop up in real discourse. If you are dealing with non-commutative objects you can deal with a few more parenthesis. Just like non-associative objects result in many more.

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Re:Problems of Traditional Math Notation (2004) by netheril96 on Monday November 06, 2017 @10:52AM (#15636286)
It doesn't matter in practice. These two bars denote either absolute value, or norm, or determinant, all of which are real or complex numbers. People surely have the freedom to define a non-commutative multiplication with real/complex scalars, but have you ever seen one?
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