randomcoach
seriously tho wrote:
It is technically ambiguous by some rule or some other rule. If you put multiplication before division, its 1. Intentionally written to obfuscate and be ambiguous so it doesnt make someone dumb or wrong to think it's something else.
seriously tho is correct.
Whether or not to use multiplication by juxtaposition or not is unclear in this situation. It isn't well defined. The order of operations rules apply when every operation is written out, but when one of the operations is removed, the rules no longer apply.
For example, if we write 12x / 2x, I clearly intend that to be 6. If I write it with the division symbol, the same assumption will usually be made.
If you read
https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Solidus.html, you'll see that Wolfram indicates that their symbolic processing will add a multiplication operator between adjacent terms, then use order of operations as we're used to them, even though most written math does not mean that.
If you use Maple, it doesn't accept implicit multiplication and forces the * operator to be written in; again, this is to avoid any ambiguity of written expression.