• mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    17 hours ago

    The slash was just because MarkDown doesn’t really make mathematical notation easy. The point is that with a slash, the 6 is over the entire 2(3) divisor. It’s the difference between these:

    You can even see that the automatic solution (in yellow) parses the two differently. In the first example, it correctly resolves the 2(3) first, because you should always simplify both the top and the bottom as much as possible before you resolve the division. But in the second, it parses the 6÷2 first, because it is left ambiguous. The slash is literally the horizontal bar, putting the dividend above the entire divisor. Except it’s in a single line, instead of taking up three lines of text for a single operation.