Christopher Smith wrote:
The limits of calculators: this one is by far the lamest of the lot. You
teach kids to use a tool but you don't teach them the limitations of the
tool or how to get around them!? Come on!
You are *way* off the mark on this one.
Find me a high school teacher who understands the limitations of a
calculator.
This is numerical analysis. Practically nobody outside of engineering
or science understands it. Practically nobody *inside* engineering or
science understands it.
Proof: Why do you think every single business major uses an HP 12B?
Because they know that it gives the correct answer for interest and
amortization calculations. They have no idea why. They have no idea
how to check. They have no idea if another calculator gets it right or
wrong. They just go buy an HP 12B. End of story.
All operations are equal: I don't know where to begin with this one,
it's so laughable. First of all, as I'm sure others have observed, with
modern processors and programming languages, multiplication *is* as fast
doing the equivalent addition or bit shifting.
It is the same O(1). The constant factor is *not* the same.
Division is generally O(log n).
However, I will agree that if it matters we're probably not talking high
school.
For example, using
log tables to do multiplication might teach you how to design a CPU
I think I need some context for this statement.
And of course his problem with
"knowing" that a binary calculator cannot represent 0.1 exactly, fails
to recognize the capabilities of calculators that maintain internal
results as rational numbers
None that I am aware of as still being in production do this.
-a
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