Quote:
Originally Posted by TonyDuell
Incidentally, I've always found the distiction between 'augend' and 'addend' to be curious. Subtraction and division are not commutative, so it makes sense to have different names for the 2 inputs. Multiplication is commutative (at least for real numbers and complex numbers) but for actually doing it it can make sense to, say, take the number with the smaller number of digits as the multiplier. But I can't think of an adder (mechanical or electronic) or indeed a way of adding by hand which is not symmetical on the 2 inputs.
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Was this not because subtraction and division done electronically in binary at the simplest level still used an adder albeit with say the "two's compliment" so you would still need to define which input was which ?