[sbuttgereit]

Looking at this issue and then trying Qalculate! as some of the other commenters to this post have mentioned.... I tried 1/2(-9.8) and it calculated it as -0.05102040816 as I was doing the entry. As soon as I hit enter, however, it popped open a dialog box saying "The expression is ambiguous" and asked me to select an interpretation of expressions with implicit multiplication, setting a preference for later use. The choices were:

Implicit multiplication first: 1/2x = 1/(2x); Conventional: 1/2x = (1/2)x; Adaptive: 1/2x = 1/(2x); 1/2 x = (1/2)x

So their answer is to just ask the user what to do! It won me over with that.

[commoner]

That's the perfect way to deal with this case. I've been using Qalculate! for quite some time, but never saw this dialog because I've apparently never entered an ambiguous expression before. Thanks for sharing this.