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Comment by idatum | Hacker News Reader

Here's another test I do with calculator apps (in radians): Pi - 4 * ATAN(1)

These apps really should produce 0 for this and avoid floating point issues. Most of us understand why it wouldn't. To me it's an experience/quality issue.

For what it's worth, the default Android calc app produces 0 (as well as nice RPN apps like Droid48).

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My go to calculator is spotlight search on my mac. Pleased to announce that it gives 0 for this.

The macOS calculator, on the other hand, has a totally ridiculous bug: it displays "Not a number" for any negative number that you try to take e^x of. 2^x and 10^x work fine, as does using the x^y button with base e. Typing "e^(-whatever)" on the Spotlight search works, as does e^x of -whatever in the iOS calculator app.

I just use a wolframalpha for everything these days. It uses symbolic computation so there's no possibility for problems like this, and it's a lot more powerful than any built-in calculator app. Almost anything can be typed in one line with natural English directives like "300mi/14mpg * $2.7/gal to Euros". Especially convenient with a browser keyword.

Check out Qalculate![1] for a program that does that and much more (though obviously not as much as WA).

1: http://qalculate.github.io/

I usually use Google for quick calculations but get annoyed when it only returns large results in scientific notation. WolframAlpha gives results in just about every conceivable way, e.g. "7 trillion" or "7 000 000 000 000" instead of 7e+12. Much nicer for someone like me who isn't used to scientific notation.

But Spotlight is just cmd-space away at all times. My only complaint is that I can't get results for date-based queries like "days since 17 Jan 2021" or "50 days from today" and I have to go to Google for those although I can at least just hit return after entering the query to have the result pop up in Safari.

My biggest complaint after switching to Windows is how poorly the start menu does math. Half the time it tells me "results are unavailable" for simple arithmetic... I don't know if it makes a web query or something to calculate but it's frustrating.

Alfred also computes it to 0

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