Originally Posted by Minte

Order of operations. Parentheses are used to indicate the order of doing the operations: in
evaluating an expression with parentheses the innermost matching pairs are evaluated rst as in
((1 + 2)2 + 5)2 = (32 + 5)2 = (9 + 5)2 = 142 = 196:

Thanks for making my point. Dinner was excellent this evening.