Show HN: Insect – a high-precision scientific calculator with physical units | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Insect – a high-precision scientific calculator with physical units

insect.sh

354 pointssharkdp195 comments

Kudos!

I would love to see two more things:

1. Propagation of uncertainty.[1] I often yearned for a calculator that automatically propagated uncertainties for me while writing my (high-school) lab reports. I think it would be life-saver functionality for many students at the very least.

2. True high-precision. I don't know how Insect works under the hood (so maybe you are already doing it this way) but instead of using high-precision results of the operations, store the operations themselves and calculate the final result at the end with the desired amount of precision.

I am aware that both requests requires a tremendous amount of change so you might as well think of them for the next major version! =)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propagation_of_uncertainty

Thank you very much for the feedback. That would be great, yes. I believe that both points are somehow already included in the issue that I'm tracking here: https://github.com/sharkdp/insect/issues/54

Unfortunately, it is not a simple change, no :-/

I absolutely agree with these requests! I am so desperate for an uncertainty-aware/unit-aware calculator that I tried implementing one myself, even though it is quite beyond my skill-set. I gave up and used Mathematica (more on that below). Two comments on the requests:

- Most existing calculators that offer propagation of uncertainty use a simplified formula -- the one with the square root and the partial derivatives. That's OK for lab courses. But in real life, the distributions of the input parameters are non-Gaussian, the formulas depend on each other in subtle ways that are easy to miss, and you have to deal with systematic and statistic errors (precision vs. accuracy). Most researches I know, myself included, sort-of fudge this with pen-and-paper and Excel, and end up underestimating their errors... In my view, the best solution is a Monte-Carlo type calculation, where you draw the input parameters from their respective distributions, then do the calculation, and repeat 10000 times. The mean and the std deviation gives you final result.

- Arbitrary precision is doable, but often unnecessary. To me, it was always more important to know when the result is numerical garbage (in which case I rearrange the equations to make them more computer-friendly), than to choose some precision up-front, hoping it would be enough. For me, interval arithmetic [1] is the best solution. All numbers are represented by the next higher and next lower floating point number, and each calculation results in a new interval, where the result is guaranteed to be in the interval. Often, the intervals blow up unnecessarily, but are still much smaller than the desired accuracy or precision. These days, whenever I get an unexpected result, I repeat the calculation with interval arithmetic in Mathematica or Matlab to exclude numerical errors. Interval arithmetic is not very costly in terms of run-time, and there are great libraries out there.

The unit-aware, uncertainty aware calculator that I ended up using for my PhD-thesis was Mathematica. Mathematica deals with units somewhat well and iterates over lists natively. You can write standard formulas and feed them lists for the Monte-Carlo calculation. However, unit calculations are extremely slow. My workaround split the calculation into one unit-calculation and 10000 unit-less calculations. However, I ran into so many Mathematica bugs and quirks that hosed the calculation ("transparent" Mathematica-updates that changed the result, file corruption (!), swalled minus-signs (!!)) that I cannot possibly recommend Mathematica for anything but toy projects.

Great work! I will keep a close eye on this awesom project!

[1]: http://subs.emis.de/LNI/Seminar/Seminar07/148.pdf

Frink can do interval arithmetic.

https://frinklang.org/#IntervalArithmetic

That only, at best, gives you the maximum and minimum values, with no knowledge of the actual distribution.

EDIT: Missed the specific request for interval arithmetic part for representation of numbers. Thought that was a proposal for the error propagation (which requires actual distributions and not simple min and max intervals).

Also, frink does not support accurate interval arithmetic for all operations, and reverts to numerically accurate bounds instead (https://frinklang.org/#IntervalArithmeticStatus). I don't know if Mathematica is any better for those.

Context fail?

Frink is a "napkin math" language that supports units, uncertainty propagation (keeping track of middle/lower/upper), and exact rational numbers. Named after Professor Frink from The Simpsons, of course. Also it has an insanely comprehensive file of units and constants (derived from GNU units and greatly expanded), so it includes handy things like earthmass, stefanboltzmann, etc.

http://frinklang.org

https://frinklang.org/frinkdata/units.txt

Wow, that seems really promising. Thanks!

Sorry to be the party stopper for a really awesome tool, just wanted to let you know that you have a dead butterfly as a logo: http://emilydamstra.com/news/please-enough-dead-butterflies/

That looks like a living butterfly.

Oh, I didn't know that :-)... that's interesting. I'm very much open for suggestions on how to improve the logo. I already went through a couple of iterations...

https://github.com/sharkdp/insect/blob/master/media/insect.s...

Fwiw I think the logo looks great

Actually it was just a "did you know?" comment, 99.99% of people don't know/care about it. I'd throw a SVG modification but I won't have my laptop around/time until Monday, when I'd just lower the upper wing a bit.

That would be great.

Wow! The article is eye-opening; worthy of submitting to HN as a news link in my opinion to create more awareness. If you agree, please submit.

I found it through the front page a few weeks back (;

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14460013

Seriously? Not to be negative but this is even more pedantic than I would expect from hacker news, and thats saying alot.

It's not a critical comment, he's just making the author aware that his logo represents something he might not be aware of.

Ah it was meant to be a fun fact/"were you aware of?" kind of comment, not even criticism (;

It has the ring of a know it all type of pedantic comment. I can safely assume that butterflys are deformed when they are pinned, I dont have to have a big expose revealing it as some hidden secret. Hackernews has the habbit of making disability level OCD seem like some grand hidden nugget that will make everyone think you are nerding better than everyone else.

Come on. This was an obvious reference to the article that was hot on HN recently.

Also while you "can safely assume that butterflys are deformed when they are pinned", you can also safely assume vast majority of the world doesn't know that, and you can also assume many people might want to reconsider using a dead butterfly as a symbol once they learn the image doesn't show what they thought it shows.

AKA regular, friendly, and completely warranted pedantry.

i'd argue it's more of an hn in joke

if you look at the previous thread(o) i think gp is either directly of indirectly referencing most of the comments therein are of the "now you've watched it you can't unwatch it" variety(i)

now, should a meta joke be the top comment about this tool? i suppose that is for the forum to decide..

but the op may find it useful information.. perhaps thae missed the previous thread

op: awesome tool

(o) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14460013

(i) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeIJ8l3PZ88

But the butterfly in the logo is pictured side-on..

The wing is still in the wrong position. The tip shouldn't be the farthest forward bit.

This is pretty cool, it's one of the rare applications I've used where the things I've tried "just work". For example "10 kg to g", "c", "c to km s^(-1)", "c to km/s" all work intuitively. It's great it works at the command line too.

Something I wish I'd had when I was studying Physics.

All of these things work in Google, btw. Google has one of the best unit conversion tools, and it's built into the search.

I've always been frustrated by how Google's unit conversion doesn't integrate well with its calculator.

That's why 99% of the time there's no need to use the calculator, just type your formula straight into the search.

And use a remote server with at least 1RTT of delay to do basic arithmetic. Big Data indeed.

It's not so basic though. Google knows the current value of most currencies, for instance. It's actually more efficient for the central servers to pull that data and the clients to query once in a while, rather than every single client (local calculator) to constantly keep all that data up to date. And that's just the currencies.

How many times in you lifetime does the inches-meters conversion rate will change?

Currencies I can understand hitting a remote server, but general unit conversion and basic arithmetic?

Also, how that statistic goes? Each Google search costs burns them about $1 in electricity costs? ;).

How is wolfram alpha? I always use it for more complicated pure math, but I don't think I ever used it for unit conversion.

It's great at unit conversions. You can do things like "number of milliseconds between amsterdam and paris at speed of sound". I use it all the time.

Your query doesn't exactly work though, it's interpreted as "paris at speed of sound". However "time between amsterdam and paris at the speed of sound in milliseconds" does work, returning 1.26*10^6 ms.

(shame smiley) I could've tested the query, but I wrote it on mobile.

Hahah, I was also on mobile. The mobile website of Wolfram Alpha works pretty good, they also have an app but haven't tried it yet.

You can convert 100m to femtoparsecs, for example.

Oh wow, even microparsec/kilofortnight in m/s works now. This did not work for many years, and prompted me to write my only ever e-mail to Google with a complaint about 5 years ago.

Unfortunaetly, the conversion 30 miles per gallon in liter/100 km still displays an equal sign, which is technically wrong. However, this conversion is so useful, that I won't complain about it.

Plus exchange rates

10EUR + 11 USD + 1500 USD + 500CAD in ZAR

There are side effects.

https://i.redditmedia.com/4FDIQLPJFtaOSXIDOlj6I9lCpVYdz8O06Y...

I always used my HP48; it had great unit support.

Thank you very much for the feedback!

GNU units(1)

Included on OS X, too! (though apparently a BSD version). Wow, I did not know this.

That's very much the BSD version, which is far more limited in capabilities.

GNU Units is available under homebrew (as "gunits" IIRC).

Hi HN! This has been posted a few months ago (by someone else), but it wasn't really finished back then. The feedback I got here last time has helped a lot to improve all sorts of things. Looking forward to your comments!

Old discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13909631

Very well polished. Congrats on finishing it!

I have only one minor issue: the REPL scrolling conflicts with the default scrolling acceleration on macOS. So just a very small movement on the trackpad and it scrolls all the way up or down. I believe this is due the "jquery-mousewheel" plugin [1].

[1]: https://github.com/jquery/jquery-mousewheel/issues/36

Thank you very much.

I'll look into this. Thank you for the reference.

So "megabytes" appears to be the power-of-ten unit, which is generally not that helpful in practice.

   ≫ 6 megabytes to bytes
     6 MB -> B
      = 6000000 B

Assuming you're sticking with the power-of-ten unit, that means you should really grow support for the (sigh) "mebibytes" family of units; i.e., what some folks are retro-actively calling the power-of-two byte unit.

   ≫ 6 mebibytes to bytes
     6 × mebibytes -> B
     Unknown identifier: mebibytes

I'd call them "MB (megabytes)" and "MMB" (marketing megabytes). Pretty clear.

There is already MiB (mebibytes) and MB (once actual megabytes, now what you call MMB).

Yes but that concedes the change in definition of MB, which I strongly dislike.

"M" - "Mega" is an official general purpose SI prefix approved in 1960 which always stood for a decimal multiplier. Its common usage as a binary multiplier was limited to counting units of computer memory, and is purely an approximation to allow convenient speaking of, e.g., a megabyte of RAM instead of 1.048576 megabytes of RAM. Because it reflects the natural scale of physical memory.

It is more properly referred to as "MeB" - "mebi", which became an ISO standard prefix in 2008.

Interesting!

But hmm..."Megameter" "Megaliter" "Megagram"

Just a small correction: the abbreviated form of mebibyte is MiB.

Thanks!

Thanks! It has already been requested: https://github.com/sharkdp/insect/issues/81

> high precision

    ≫ e*1e15
      e × 1000000000000000
       = 2718280000000000

Needs a bit of work, I think.

Yet weirdly enough sin(pi) and 1 - log(e) are pretty close to 0 (still not exact but accurate to 30 digits).

I realize it looks confusing in this example but this is just how it is displayed (with 6 significant digits). The internal precision is 30 digits.

Indeed:

    >>> tan(90 deg)

      tan(90°)

       = 14444300000000000

    >>> tan(pi/2)

      tan(pi / 2)

       = -70710700000000000000

    >>> tan(180 deg)

      tan(180°)

       = -1.38463e-16

tan(90°) and tan(π/2) should both be undefined, but in Insect, they a) have a value and b) are not even equal.

Weirdly enough, cos(π) and cos(2π) are exactly -1 and 1.

I use Python with pint [0] for this. It integrates with numpy. It has support for uncertainty. You can do all calculations Python can, Python math reads like ascii math. It also can output to latex.

This can easily run local. If you prefer online repl, it's available on repl.it [1]. There you can keep your scripts in the cloud for later, with rudimentary versioning.

[0] https://github.com/hgrecco/pint [1] https://repl.it

Looks nice, but is there a reason it interprets m^2 * Pa correctly

  ≫ 1 Pa * 2 m^2 / N
    1 Pa × (2 × m^2 / N)
     = 2

but doesn't automatically convert a result to N?

  ≫ 1 Pa * 2 m^2
    1 Pa × 2 × m^2
     = 2 m²·Pa

Same with W, J, s and all their relations.

Thank you for the feedback!

Automatic simplification (as opposed to explicit conversion) is a complex topic. There are a few simplifications that are already applied, for example:

  20 L / m^2
   = 0.02 m

You are absolutely right, it'd be nice to have "Pa·m²" be converted to "N" automatically. I've been thinking about simply going through a list of simple, standardized units (SI units like Newton) while trying to convert the result into these simple units. However, notice that this is not always what you want. If someone likes to compute in imperial units, we would rather leave all quantities in imperial units.

you could only apply simplifications that minimised the sum of the absolute value of all the unit exponents. that would be intuitively satisfying, and not require converting imperial to metric (which would leave the exponents unchanged)

Good suggestion, thank you! I was already thinking about some way to measure "perceived complexity" of a physical unit - this sounds like a very good try for such a heuristic.

Please everyone in the US (and everywhere else) stop using the word imperial to describe the US Customary system of units.

The Imperial system uses the same names for many units but the sizes of several important ones are different.

For instance Insect says:

≫ 1 gal/1litre 1 gal / 1 L = 3.78541

If this gallon were really Imperial then it would say.

≫ 1 gal/1litre 1 gal / 1 L = 4.54609

This is mostly because 1 pint US is 16 fluid ounce US but 1 pint imperial is 20 fluid ounce imperial.

But be careful because 1 fluid ounce imperial is 28.4131 ml, whereas 1 fluid ounce US is 29.5735 ml.

Looks really nice!

≫ exp(2*kg/s)

  exp(2 × (kg / s))

  Conversion error:
    Cannot convert quantity of unit kg/s to a scalar

Excellent!

Is there any way I can save a list of variables to file and then reload them?

I also would like to vote for supporting imaginary numbers (Issue #47).

Thank you for the feedback!

> Is there any way I can save a list of variables to file and then reload hem?

Not yet, no - thank you for the suggestion. The command-line version can read from a file, though (https://github.com/sharkdp/insect/issues/40)

Great work indeed. I'd also love to see support for complex numbers. A big differentiator over other calculators.

Well done!

Plain and easy to understand interface and excellent use of colour and space. Two suggestions:

1. While I doubt it'll be used very much, consider adding calories for completeness if nothing else:

  1000 kcal -> joules

  1000 Cal -> joules

You might also throw in cal for just for fun[1]!

2. Change Variables to Constants. I think this is more in keeping with standard jargon.

[1]: cal is based on the gram while Cal or kcal is based on the kilogram.

Thank you for the feedback!

1. Yes, I'll definitely add calories, good suggestion.

2. Yes, that's probably a good idea. I should distinguish constants and (user-defined) variables.

calories are supported now.

Hmm, I find the auto-associativity to be a bit weird for example:

≫ 1/12 c

  1 / (12 × c)
   = 2.7797e-10 s/m

Thank you very much for the feedback!

This is on purpose (see operator precedence rules: https://github.com/sharkdp/insect#reference). Implicit multiplication (without an explicit multiplication operator) has a higher precedence than division in order for something like this to work:

  tan(15cm/3m)

  = tan(15cm/(3m))

On the other hand, explicit multiplication has a lower precedence than division, so you would have to write "1/12*c". I agree that it can be confusing at times (that's why there is a pretty printer), but I don't want the language/parser to be whitespace-aware.

See how GNU units resolves this:

  1/10 m -> 0.1 / m
  1|10 m -> 0.1 m
  27 ^ 2/3 -> 243
  27 ^ 2|3 -> 9

You get the gist of it - a division operator with insane precedence.

Ha! That's a really neat idea. Thank you for sharing this. I'll consider adding it.

Apparently unit-less constants should bind stronger:

1/4 s - > (1/4) s

1 m / 4 s - > (1 m) / (4 s)

I use this tool also: http://pythonhosted.org/uncertainties It comes in pretty handy for a quick calculation with error propagation.

If it could deduce density from the material name, it'd useful for volume-to-mass conversions., e.g.

   1 cup of butter -> g

Not sure if it's quite scientific though... :)

Wolfram Alpha can do this:

  (density of gold) * (average volume of human)

  -> 1282 kg

And if you do:

  (density of gold) * (average volume of human) * (price of gold)

It will even show you a plot of the time series of its value since the early 20th century.

GNU Units is extensible in this regard. You can add your own dimensions.

I'm trying to think of how you'd specify density of butter, perhaps "butterdensity", cognate, "earthmass".

I've got a number of geographic areas specified, so I can give you, say, paper size in milli manhattanarea.

Looks pretty nice, but no light years? No attoparsecs? You don't even have hogsheads or fortnights!!!!!1!

Still, it's pretty good.

Thank you for the feedback. I'm always open for suggestions on new units (https://github.com/sharkdp/purescript-quantities)!

Please see http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/page/reg-standards-conve... :-)

Yes, please add light years, parsecs. Perhaps weight of planets in our solar system, and the sun?

lightyears and parsecs are here, now.

Thanks! You could also add speedoflight?

lightyears, (atto)parsecs and fortnights are now supported.

I like this, but would really like a convert-to-base-units function.

  ≫ sqrt(1/(eps0 mu0)) ->m/s
    sqrt(1 / (eps0 × mu0)) -> m / s
     = 299833000 m/s
  ≫ sqrt(mu0/eps0) ->ohm
    sqrt(mu0 / eps0) -> Ω
     = 377.031 Ω

Fun fact: Converting to a unit is exactly the same as dividing by it (temperatures are the exception), so this works too:

    ≫ sqrt(mu0/eps0) / ohm
      sqrt(mu0 / eps0) / Ω
       = 376.73

Also seems like the constants (!) got changed a bit since you executed this

Thank you for the feedback! I'm open for any syntax suggestions.

Maybe something like SI(sqrt(1/(eps0 mu0))) = 299792458 m/s factor(sqrt(mu0/eps0),ohm) = SI(sqrt(mu0/eps0)/ohm)*ohm = 376.730 Ω

Needs more temperature scales than just kelvin.

US Engineering units of energy would also be help certain people: such as BTUs British Thermal Units etc.

I thought about it for some time and decided not to add Celsius and Fahrenheit: https://github.com/sharkdp/insect/issues/68

They are useful, of course, when it comes to simple unit conversions. But they lead to all kinds of problems if you start using them in calculations (which is what Insect is mostly for).

calories are supported now

I have been using Frink for over 7 years. Aside from a calculator with a gazillion units, Frink lets you program in a less verbose Java for other tasks. Graphics are easy too. I write small apps for calculations I often need at work with GUIs and input prompts. What makes Insect different? Can you program apps in it?

Looks nice! are you relying on mathjs? I think it has some of the same functionality.

If not, is the conversion logic in an npm package?

package.json and bower.json does not include mathjs, so it doesn't seem like it does rely on mathjs.

Yes. The underlying unit-conversion library is called https://github.com/sharkdp/purescript-quantities It does not have a (nice) JavaScript API, so far, as it is written in PureScript - like Insect.

For those interested on a CLI counterpart, GNU units is more or less the same. The units definitions file is enormous

Shameless plug for my http://dedo.io/, which is similar to this this, but with less features, more money-oriented and support for any custom units, e.g. if bag_weight = 12 kg / bag, then 10 bags * bag_weight is 120kg

Here are some more:

http://mathnotepad.com https://arve0.github.io/webcas/

Nice, but

  sin (30 rad)
  sin × 30 rad
  Unknown identifier: sin

Wouldn't it be great if software evaluated things, and if things didn't made sense, considered what the possible alternatives were, a bit like semantic checkers for spelling and grammar in text?

    sin(30 rad)
     = -0.988032

I think you've missed my point. I'm saying that it would be nice if interactive tools were a bit smarter and could guess that the white space was unwanted. Syntax checking in editors has improved a lot but it should do more than just suggest long variable names as you're typing them.

    2**100+1-2**100

Equals 0?

It seems it uses approximate floating point arithmetics, with 30 digit precision.

Correct. "2^99 + 1 - 2^99" still works because 2^99 < 10^30

A confusing thing is that the program seems to be using the purescript-quantity library which uses the purescript-decimals library which is arbitrary precision numbers, if I followed the dependencies correctly.

The readme also advertises it can deal with 10^(10^10), which it can (doubles can't deal with this, so it's definitely not just using Javascript doubles). The part which prints out numbers rounds to 6 places, but I don't see any place which rounds intermediate results.

Edit: Found where 30 digits comes in. https://github.com/sharkdp/purescript-decimals/blob/ad719fc7...

That's nice test but to fair their tagline says high precision not arbitrary precision.

Hi Sharkdp, wonderful product. I think that unit and command autocompletion would be super useful!

Hi, thank you very much for the feedback. Actually, autocompletion should work already?

I really like the UI and seeming wealth of different units. It doesn't look like it supports fluid ounces though.

I tried "4 tbsp to oz" and it interprets oz as mass instead of volume. Google correctly gives me 2 as the answer.

It doesn't support "stones" (st?) either. I tried "20 st -> kg" (Game of Thrones uses stones as units of mass) but it didn't work.

Thank you for the feedback. I'm not sure how to support this. I would probably have to call it "fluid_ounce" / "fl_oz" or "fl.oz." in order to distinguish it from the unit of mass.

You could try to go the complicated route to disambiguate based on whether the other units present are liquid volume or mass.

Well, the way /usr/bin/units solves it is to allow "floz", "usfloz", "fluidounce", or "usfluidounce".

Having to learn that you can type "floz" is better than not being able to do it at all.

(You could also allow "fl oz", "fluid ounce", "fl ounce", etc. if you tweak your parser a little bit, but that's the deluxe version, and any functionality at all would be a big improvement.)

Thank you. I'll add one of those.

floz and fluidounce are now supported.

Nice. This is a lot like (in looks and some functionality) the macOs app, 'Numi' (which I love) : https://numi.io/

Numi looks nice! I like the syntax

I use the similar Soulver on my Mac and iOS devices.

Nice.

I probably mostly use Numi for unit conversions, but asked for in a 'human' way. eg "68 square meters in square feet"

Damn, that looks sweet. Is there a similar app out there for Android and Ubuntu/Debian?

Very nice on first try -- added to my quick toolbar. Great to be able to intermix metric and SAE units, as there is (very unfortunate) constant use of both in my field of work.

Any hope of an Android app version soon?

Found a bug : sin(pi) = 8.62803e-81

Close enough.

Nice, though I'm still highly partial to GNU Units. In large part as it allows specifying output units, and not just for conversions.

Note: if you're on MacOS and are using the supplied 'units' utility, that is BSD, not GNU units. You're going to want to install gunits from Homebrew.

https://www.gnu.org/software/units/

Thank you for the feedback. What do you mean by "specifying output units"? Insect has the "->" operator which does that:

  40000 km / c -> ms

   = 133.426 ms

Ah, I didn't find that. Yes, that's useful.

Looks good! A lot of things seem to just work.

Can you stop the cursor blinking?

If you do something like pi 1e20, I think it should print out all the digits it has instead of printing zeros.

Interesting.

And it looks useful.

Unfortunately that means you will be inundated with requests for further improvements. :-)

I see that you have a built in constant for μ0, mu0.

But it evaluates to

    0.00000125664 N/A²

for the ultimate in precision surely it should be expressed as

    4π×10−7 N/A²

At least when I use mu0 in spreadsheets, etc., I always define it that way, easier to remember too. And sometimes it lets me see that the pi cancels out.

I tried to convert 1000 rpm (revolutions per minute) to Hertz (periods per second), but I get

    Unknown identifier: rpm

rpm are supported now. Thanks.

Too bad it doesn't support complex numbers

≫ round(pi * 100000000000000000) = 314159265358979324

≫ round(pi * 1000000000000000000) = 3141590000000000000

(similar comment by @btown down there about e)

This is only how it is displayed, internal precision is always 30 digits.

Floating point numbers are displayed with 6 significant digits

Integers are displayed with all digits, unless there are more than ~20 digits, then it is displayed with exponential notation

I'm a little confused as to how this improves on GNU units, which seems to support far more:

    $ cat .units
    period(len) units=[m;s] 2pi*sqrt(len/gravity) ; (period/2pi)^2 * gravity
    $ units
    2980 units, 109 prefixes, 97 nonlinear units
    
    You have: period(20cm)
    You want: 
            Definition: 0.89729351 s
    You have: period(20cm)
    You want: ms
            * 897.29351
            / 0.0011144625
    You have: period(2ft)
    You want: ms
            * 1566.5419
            / 0.00063834872
    You have: 5 GiB
    You want: bytes
            * 5.3687091e+09
            / 1.8626451e-10
    You have: 5 hundred million
    You want: 
            Definition: 5e+08
    You have: tempF(100)
    You want: tempC
            37.777778

is it supposed to be a competitor? learn how to use a new language? I don't get it.

I like the idea of keeping units, but I'm not sure this makes things easier:

    ≫ V * A / J
      V × (A / J)
       = 1 V·A/J

    You have: V*A/J
    You want: 
             Definition: 1 / s

I'd say better user experience. But then again qalculate! also does provide you with that.

https://qalculate.github.io/

    {~} % qalc
    > c to km s^(-1)                                                      
    
      speed_of_light = approx. 299792.46(km / s)                          
    
    > 10 kg to g                                                          
    
      10 * kilogram = 10000 g          
    
    > $10 to euro    
    
      dollar * 10 = approx. EUR 8.9501477

    > 100oF to oC                                                         
    
      (((100 * kelvin) + (459.67 * kelvin)) * 5) / 9 = approx. 37.777778 oC

> I'm a little confused as to how this improves on GNU units, which seems to support far more [...]

> is it supposed to be a competitor? learn how to use a new language? I don't get it.

No reason to be confused. GNU units is a great tool. qalculate and speedcrunch are great, too. Insect is just my take at it. Each of these tools has advantages and disadvantages. As for insect, one of the advantages for me is that it is platform-agnostic and can be used from anywhere without installation. The "You have: X; You want: Y" interface is basically replaced by "X -> Y".

> As for insect, one of the advantages for me is that it is platform-agnostic and can be used from anywhere without installation.

wouldn't emscripten work great then? maybe you could add support for definitions in "units" format?

> I don't get it.

Oh, common.

Someone wrote something that's similar to X. If you are so well versed in GNU tools, you surely old enough to know that this happens all the time, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. People like scratching the proverbal itch and creating stuff. What's there to "not get" and what's the point in feigning a surprise and implying OP's ignorance along the way?

If you want to mention that X exists, just say that -"There's X, which is similar. Have you seen it?"

There are two differences from GNU Units that I can see straightaway from the GitHub repo:

1. It's written in PureScript.

2. It's MIT licensed. (Actually I had to search the repo to find this - it would be nice if it had a LICENSE file at the top-level that GitHub could pick up.)

Anyway, IMO monocultures suck and competition is good. Kudos to the OP!

What's the URL for that? Not everyone uses Linux. In fact, almost nobody does.

I'd love a calculator that can implicitly recognize hh:mm:ss notation and can answer queries like ...

3:20:36 / 26.2

7:35 * 26.2

Really great tool! Thanks for the hard work. It would also be really nice to specify custom units, such as

    ≫ U = 1e-6/60 * kat
    
      U = 1.66667e-8 kat

Because now it does this

    ≫ 1 kat -> U
    
      1 kat -> U
    
       = 1 kat

Thank you for the feedback. Defining own units does not work currently, but you can simply divide by your new unit:

  >>> U = 1e-6/60 * kat
  
    U = 1.66667e-8 kat
  
  >>> 1 kat / U
  
    1 kat / U
  
     = 60000000

Nice tool! Not too obvious from the landing page that there is a terminal version. Also, some units come with implicit assumptions:

    ≫ 1 month -> days
      1 month -> d
       = 30.4167 d
    ≫ 1 year -> days
      1 year -> d
       = 365 d

Thank you for the feedback. I should probably consider adding something like "Full documentation and terminal version available here". I hesitated for quite some while before adding "month" and "year" but these (potentially confusing) defaults seemed more useful to me compared to leaving them out.

Very nice! Any plans to add decibel/log-scale units? That would make this even handier.

Thank you! "bel" is already supported ("decibel" also, due to the handling of SI prefixes). Unfortunately, "dB" is parsed as "deci-byte". While this is not really a useful unit, this is on purpose (see https://github.com/sharkdp/insect/issues/67) in order to support "kB", "MB", etc. for "kilobyte", "megabyte", etc.

This is worthy of fixing in my opinion. I do see this as a nuance, but if this is what the common usage of dB is, it should be supported.

That's cute. Are there any phone apps which do that?

Remember Graphing Calculator? That could use such features.

Autodesk Inventor understands units in formulas, but mostly for length and angle. Everything becomes meters internally.

There is a version of Frink(lang) for Android. I don't think there's one for iOS. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=frink.android&...

Soulver does it (Mac/iPhone), it just uses 'as' instead of '->'

E.g. "6Mbit/s * 1.5h as GB"

I've been using it for a while now and I can't imagine going back to a traditional calculator

"9 min/mile -> km/h" fails since they are different dimensions. However in reality we do use both of these units to indicate speed. This might be a stretch but will be good to incorporate if it can be generalized.

There's also a fork (of an older version of this) for binary instead of physical units: https://soupi.github.io/insect/

This is way faster than Wolfram Alpha and much simpler to use for most use cases :)

4 mi / min 4 × mi / min Unknown identifier: mi ≫ 4 miles / min 4 mi / min = 4 mi/min

Wut? Looks like some strangeness for the parser.

hmmm, I'm a little bit skeptical about this.

I'd be cool to have this as a python script somewhere but I am not quite sure wether I would visit this site whenever I need to calculate some physical units, especially since google already covers most of my needs

dont get me wrong, I think otherwise it looks and feels great and is easy to use but I dont know who will use this.

Thank you for the feedback. Fair point: Google's unit conversion is really good. For me, there's mainly two things that stand out compared to using a Google search:

* The REPL: I wanted an interactive terminal-style calculator where I could press Arrow-Up and easily change a few things. It also lets me define my own variables and use them in my calculations. It saves the history so I can come back and press Ctrl-R to find a recent calculation.

* Combination of Web- and terminal version. I often work in the terminal instead of the browser where I can easily use the CLI version of insect.

There's a good python library to work with units: it's called Pint (named after a certain quantity of beer). Afaik it does everything OP does, and more and better.

cool! Quick minor suggestion, would be cool to support words for numbers like five kilometers or five million seconds!

Thank you. Same request is tracked here: https://github.com/sharkdp/insect/issues/86

I tried to enter

3 5

which was interpreted as 3 * 5. Seems a bit risky to me :) Otherwise looks neat.

Thank you for the feedback. That is intentional. Whitespace (or even lack thereof, as in "2x") is implicit multiplication. Otherwise, you'd have to write multiplication signs everywhere:

  2*sin(5*cm/(2*m))

Yes, whitespace as multiplication between number and unit or variable will be expected as multiplication but you can consider warning users about whitespace between two number literals because that could be just a typo.

It's not working on my Android, Dolphin browser. I am unable to type anything on the prompt.

  ≫ 1 mile / 2 km
    1 mi / 2 km
     = 0.804672

Great, but it would be nice to show the result's unit.

  ≫ 1/2km
    1 / 2 km
     = 0.5 km⁻¹

It's been a long while since I did any real maths, so I'm slightly stumped as to why the -1 exponent is there.

In your first example, the result of the calculation is dimensionless (length divided by length), so it does not require any unit. It's a scalar value.

In your second example, the input gets parsed as "1/(2km)" which is equal to "0.5 km⁻¹". If you wanted half a kilometer, you'd have to enter "1/2*km"

Great tool. I would love to see computing units -- gb/s, etc.

They are already supported. There is "B" or "byte" for byte and "bit" for bit. SI-prefixes are case-sensitive, so "G" is for giga, "M" for mega, "m" for milli.

  >>> 6 Mbit/s * 1.5 hours to GB

    (6 Mbit / s) × 1.5 h -> GB

     = 4.05 GB

First thing I tried: >> 2 min 35 s + 3 min 54 s = 13920 s²

whitespace is multiplication. If you use explicit addition, it should work:

  2 min + 35 s + 3 min + 54 s

   = 6.48333 min

≫ pi pi = 3.14159

High-precision!

Needs more energy units then Joules

calories are supported now.

I tried e ^ (i * pi)

This is exactly what I've been looking for for years. A fast easy calculator that's as convenient as a physical school calculator but with familiar programming style input since computers don't have scientific calculator keys. I can do sqrt(2) much easier than Windows' calculator and it doesn't have the ridiculous attempt to copy a physical calculator's quirks like pressing equals twice to re-apply the previous operation or having an "inverse"/"2nd function" button.

Units is a bonus but really just the calculator is less frustrating than anything else I've ever seen. Google search is too unpredictable - morphing into a typical confusing 1970's style keypad design after your first calculation. I tried a couple of desktop applications and they were no better either. Come one calculator app designers - stop trying to copy a physical calculator. Those already have a terrible design and computers don't have the same constraints or freedoms as them.

Even better, it can act like a desktop Windows app simply by saving the page in Chrome! Beat that for latency, Google!

Frink has existed for ages.

https://frinklang.org/

Thanks! I'm glad you like it.

Nice. But no RPN? I pass!

Fails at the first fundamental test:

  Meaning of life

      Meaning × of × life

      Unknown identifier: Meaning

Oh no :-)

Quick workaround:

≫ Meaning = 6

≫ of = 1

≫ life = 7

Hmmm, I now wish Douglas Adams had chosen 56.

Meaning = 7

of = 2

Life = 4

It unfortunately fails my go-to test for these calculators:

    ≫ 7.8L/100km -> miles/gallon
      7.8 L / 100 km -> mi / gal
      Conversion error:
        Cannot convert unit L/km (base units: m²)
                    to unit mi/gal (base units: m⁻²)

That's because your unit conversion is invalid. It's entirely possible to construct an equation that computes mi/gal from L/km (or from gal/mi for that matter), but the dimmensionalty of the two numbers clearly disagree. Yes, you can introduce scenarios like yours where "any human" would know what the intended meaning of the question is, but mathematically speaking it's incorrect and encouraging a calculator to perform mathematically incorrect operations is a recipie for both disaster and the introduction of student/user misunderstandings.

For what it's worth, it works on google.

https://www.google.com/search?q=5+l/100km+to+mpg&ie=UTF-8&oe...

Sure, because google isn't a calculator, it's an AI machine. Sometimes it guesses your intent right, sometimes it doesn't. That's fine for many tasks but not a great way to design a bridge or a steam boiler.

Yes, 100% agree with your comment. I'd rather have a calculator application that is maybe a little less "smart" in exchange for mathematical correctness and predictability.

I don't remember which calculator did this (I think GNU units), but I've seen this handled automatically with a warning saying "Warning: reciprocal conversion"

Yes, that's what GNU units does:

  $ units
  Currency exchange rates from www.timegenie.com on 2016-06-21 
  2926 units, 109 prefixes, 88 nonlinear units
  
  You have: 7.8L/10km
  You want: miles/gallon
  	reciprocal conversion
  	* 3.0155716
  	/ 0.33161209

I think it's fine for a calculator to make guesses as long as it makes it very clear that it's doing so.

The dimensionality for your query is wrong. If you fix that it works just fine:

    ≫ 100km/7.8L -> miles / gal
      100 km / 7.8 L -> mi / gal
       = 30.1557 mi/gal

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