I know generally how to convert an infix expression into a postfix expression; but I came lately across this quadratic expression: $\left(4y^2 + 2x - 1\right)$ that I had to convert into postfix and it raised a couple of questions for me, namely:
If I have the following expression: $4y^2$ would I treat $4y$ as just one operand or $2$ separate operands?
I believe that the postfix equivalent of $4y^2$ would be: 4y2^*
Thank you in advance for clearing this ambiguity for me!
On
You may find this of interest:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shunting-yard_algorithm.
The article contains a detailed, generalized description of an algorithm that converts tokenized infix expressions into reverse-Polish.
The implicit parenthesization of $4y^2$ is $4(y^2)$, so your
4y2^*is correct.