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A comment on GCD and the magic of subtraction. Parent comment

Re:GCD and the magic of subtraction by quietbritishjim on Tuesday August 25, 2020 @06:44AM (#24269927)
In your examples, it's not the brackets signifying the multiplication. It's the adjacency that signifies the multiplication (as in e.g. 3x) and in they happen to need brackets to highlight the precendence which would be lost in e.g. 3x + 5.

The notation of the article logically follows because e.g. (4) = 4 but using that as a "cheat" to enable multiplication of numeric literals using adjacency is very rare I think.

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Re:GCD and the magic of subtraction by thaumasiotes on Tuesday August 25, 2020 @06:47AM (#24269956)
No, it's not rare. It's still quite common when you have people manipulating literal numbers. The literal numbers are what's rare.
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Re:GCD and the magic of subtraction by hansbo on Tuesday August 25, 2020 @07:07AM (#24270081)
You say it's not rare, but I can't remember ever seeing it before reading this article.
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Re:GCD and the magic of subtraction by dhosek on Tuesday August 25, 2020 @11:57AM (#24272641)
Likely because you haven't encountered it since junior high school. It's not uncommon notation in pre-algebra and occasionally beginning algebra.
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