Asking the Right Questions

Are there right questions? Are there wrong questions? I'm not going to talk about the ethicality of certain questions, but there are questions that have answers and questions that don't have answers. When I began working on java programming, I searched for months on end through Google, Bing, Ask, and about every search engine, "how to create a calculator that knows PEMDAS." One of my goals is to create the most intuitive, powerful calculator on the Android Market, and knowing how to create this PEMDAS calculator was one of the first steps. However, my efforts were fruitless in asking this question. So I tried to solve my problems through brute force. And in doing so, I began to ask other questions, like, "how do I separate operator data - +,-,*,/- from numbers." How do I take a user input that's "8*9*1/4+3" and output "21"? And I came to realize from more searches that what I was looking for is an "expression parser". So if you have been programming and get stuck, try re-wording your question. Look at it from a different angle. Good luck!