There are plenty of contexts where writing in a single flat line is necessary, so it’s still useful to address the issue.
Just using more brackets is always a solution, but it can become messy and hard to read if you take it to the extreme (there’s a Minute Physics video where he does this and it unintentionally shows you just how bad it is), so it eventually becomes a matter of agreeing on convention and using brackets judicially where there’s actual ambiguity.
Even then, the implicit multiplication already removes some of the ambiguity. 2(2+2) should be on the same side of the fraction, otherwise you’d have 8(2+2). However, if you had 8 / 2 * (2+2) then it would be treated as 8(2+2) / 2.
The problem is the /. Usually you’d use a fraction bar, which groups it and makes it unambiguous
There are plenty of contexts where writing in a single flat line is necessary, so it’s still useful to address the issue.
Just using more brackets is always a solution, but it can become messy and hard to read if you take it to the extreme (there’s a Minute Physics video where he does this and it unintentionally shows you just how bad it is), so it eventually becomes a matter of agreeing on convention and using brackets judicially where there’s actual ambiguity.
Division (operator) and fraction bar (grouping symbol) aren’t the same. It already is unambiguous.
Even then, the implicit multiplication already removes some of the ambiguity. 2(2+2) should be on the same side of the fraction, otherwise you’d have 8(2+2). However, if you had 8 / 2 * (2+2) then it would be treated as 8(2+2) / 2.