>>11106530It is ultimately an arbitrary determination. In the US, the common determination for order of operations is PEMDAS (left-to-right) but the "MD" and "AS" are considered interchangeable (since division is multiplication by reciprocal and subtraction is addition by negation). In that case, the expression is parsed as:
8/2*(2+2) = 8*(1/2)*4 = 16
But it's not uncommon for this to be violated. For example, no sane mathematician would parse 1/2pi as (1/2)*pi.
