translating infix to postfix the next several pages are devoted to explaining how to translate an expression from infix notation into postfix this algorithm is fairly involvedso don' worry if every detail isn' clear at first if you get bogged downyou may want to skip ahead to the section "evaluating postfix expressions to understand how to create postfix expressionyou might find it helpful to see how postfix expression is evaluatedfor examplehow the value is extracted from the expression +*which is the postfix equivalent of *( + (notice that in this discussionfor ease of writingwe restrict ourselves to expressions with single-digit numbersalthough these expressions may evaluate to multidigit numbers how humans evaluate infix how do you translate infix to postfixlet' examine slightly easier question firsthow does human evaluate normal infix expressionalthoughas we stated earliersuch evaluation is difficult for computerwe humans do it fairly easily because of countless hours in mr klemmer' math class it' not hard for us to find the answer to + + or *( + by analyzing how we evaluate this expressionwe can achieve some insight into the translation of such expressions into postfix roughly speakingwhen you "solvean arithmetic expressionyou follow rules something like this you read from left to right (at leastwe'll assume this is true sometimes people skip aheadbut for purposes of this discussionyou should assume you must read methodicallystarting at the left when you've read enough to evaluate two operands and an operatoryou do the calculation and substitute the answer for these two operands and operator (you may also need to solve other pending operations on the leftas we'll see later you continue this process--going from left to right and evaluating when possible--until the end of the expression tables and show three examples of how simple infix expressions are evaluated laterin tables and we'll see how closely these evaluations mirror the process of translating infix to postfix to evaluate + - you would carry out the steps shown in table