General > General Technical Chat
What calculator do you use ?
jeroen74:
There are programs and languages that can handle as many digits as you like, just limited by the amount of memory there is.
amyk:
--- Quote from: rr100 on November 22, 2012, 09:08:00 am ---I just want some calculator that uses more than the usual 8-12-16-20 digits for the "significant digits" in the float/scientific numbers. It's not that much a question of resources, the "standard" quad precision will give you roughly 34 digits while using 16 bytes (including for sign and signed exponent). It isn't that much and it wouldn't be even if have it 10x or 20x times larger. But problem is everything (I mean scientific calculators, including TI-89) don't do even half of that.
--- End quote ---
The good thing about programmable calculators is that you can program most of them to do arbitrary-precision calculations. As for why the stock firmware doesn't: most likely not many people have a use for that, even for scientific calculators. In practice, ~10 significant digits are plenty; even the fundamental constants of the universe are rarely more accurate than that.
tom66:
Calculator with Ubuntu:
(180)Ă—asin(acos(atan(tan(cos(sin(9/180))))))?9
= 9
It uses bignum, so can be very precise. I think Windows Calculator uses a bignum calculation too.
rr100:
I know about computer programs, for kicks I just recovered from the very first CD I ever burned Maple V Rel 3 (1994!). It would run in 2MB of RAM (possibly 1) and do miracles. "bc" is the GPL tool of choice for this kind of things, comes with most linuxes by default; this is before we go full blown Sage or something similar.
And yes, I did find something for the programmable calculators: http://www.hpcalc.org/details.php?id=1320
You can look in the PDFs from the archive, LONG.PDF for example, just what the doctor ordered. As opposed to what I've found for TI this one would also do much more than 4 operations, it would do all the usual transcendent ones you need (sin, cos, whatever).
As for practical use I mentioned in the previous example, sometimes you just need to add/substract (or do similar but more complicated stuff, like sin(a)-sin(b)) things of wildly different orders of magnitude. Any scientific calculator knows what 1 is and what 1/10^25 (or even much smaller numbers) is. But if you add them together the result will be on most calculators ... 1. That is fine in itself ... unless you need to substract this "1", in which case you'll get 0 instead of whatever number you're really interested in.
rr100:
And here's another funny one; I mentioned GNU bc above which is coming with basically any linux for quite a while. Guess what, I can't find the Android port/version!!!
BUT I could find Windows, Windows CE and iPhone versions!!!! WTF?
http://www.appover.com/search/bc-mobile/349255871/
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/bc.htm
http://www.findbestopensource.com/product/yabcalc
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