On Wed, 24 Jan 2001, Pablo Manalastas wrote:
> Quoting "Rafael R. Sevilla" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>
> > .. I was able to help development with the open source calculator
> > EasyCalc; thanks to me the calculator now has better complex number
> > support and special functions (Bessel, Error, Gamma, and so forth). You
> > can get it at easycalc.sourceforge.net.
>
> Thank you for helping write such a useful free calculator.
>
> 1. I was in Ateneo de Davao and I was installing a linux host to be
> used for Haskell programming. While trying to get the network
> connection to work, I needed to do decimal-to-hex and
> decimal-to-binary conversions (computing subnet mask, network address,
> etc). I had my Palm m100 running EasyCalc, and I did not know how to
> do the conversions. The Integer calculator mode has [Bin], [Dec],
> [Hex] keys but their use is not intuitive. My failed attempt was:
> press on [Dec], enter the graffiti 192, highlight the 192, press on
> [Hex], and nothing happens. What am I doing wrong? (All I wanted was
> to convert decimal 192 to hex. Why can't EasyCalc be like a normal
> calculator?
>
The way it works is you enter the number, press EXE, then the
Bin/Oct/Dec/Hex buttons will convert the displayed result appropriately.
They control the display of the result. To convert from decimal to hex,
you would start in Dec mode, enter your number, type EXE, and then press
Hex. The radix buttons control the mode in which you enter numbers and in
which numbers are displayed in Integer mode; they don't access radix
conversion functions (which don't even exist). They're mode buttons...
> 2. Another useful feature is "Fraction" mode, which will allow
> computations like 345&23/1000037 + 100417/100001 that will give the
> answer in fraction form in lowest terms. This feature is already
> available in many new scientific calculators. The denominator is not
> limited to 3 digits. Will EasyCalc have this feature soon?
>
I don't know if we can do this. Already, EasyCalc is something like 120K
in size, and to do a fraction mode where the numerator and denominator can
grow arbitrarily large would require a bignum library, which I'm not sure
we can fit. I think the best we can do is limit it to five digits, but
even then, we run into syntactic difficulties, i.e., how do you *enter*
fractions? We can't very well use the / because it's already used for
division. If you have any ideas on how we can do this, we'll see if we
can incorporate it...
--
Rafael R. Sevilla <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> +63 (2) 4342217
ICSM-F Development Team, UP Diliman +63 (917) 4458925
OpenPGP Key ID: 0x0E8CE481
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