Re: [Tuxmath-devel] Math equations formula

[Samuel H. <cri...@ge...>]

On Monday 27 August 2001  1:50pm, William Kendrick wrote:
> I'd like people's suggestions regarding the way equations are
> created in TuxMath.
<snip>
> Sam has already pointed out that we probably should support negative
> answers, so this one will probably go away. :)
>
> (Question, though... should either "eq1" and/or "eq2" be allowed to be
> negative?  eg, " 5 x -3 = -15 " ???)

Ew... yeah that's something I hadn't thought of either. Man that could get 
overly complicated.

I think we need to decide exactly how general we want this to be. If want it 
to be as general as possible, then yes, things like "5 x -3" should be 
allowed. If we want to simply supply subsets (perhaps no negative numbers are 
allowed in the equations, but negatives are allowed in the solutions), then 
things like "5 x -3" would not be allowed, but we would have to document that 
(so that any educator using the game wouldn't assume they could get these 
math problems).

I would say that if it can easily be done in the code, then we should allow 
for generalities like this (again, this is coming from someone who has yet to 
really /look/ at the code to see how easy/difficult it would be to add this 
option ;-)

-- 
Sam "Criswell" Hart <cri...@ge...> AIM, Yahoo!: <criswell4069>
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