this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2025
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Some people insist there's no "correct" order for the basic arithmetic operations. And worse, some people insist the correct order is parenthesis first, then left to right.
Both of those sets of people are wrong.
Hopefully you can see where their confusion might come from, though. PEMDAS is more P-E-MD-AS. If you have a bunch of unparenthesized addition and subtraction, left to right is correct. A lot of like, firstgrader math problems are just basic problems that are usually left to right (but should have some extras to highlight PEMDAS somewhere I'd hope).
So they're mostly telling you they only remember as much math as a small child that barely passed math exercizes.
PE(MD)(AS)
Now just remember to account for those parentheses first...
If you have a bunch of unparenthesized addition and subtraction, left to right doesn't matter.
1 + 2 - 3 = 1 - 3 + 2 = -3 + 2 + 1