Hacker News Reader

The irony of advocating against a "separate utility", and then promoting a separate utility...

You never use a calculator?

I use calculators plenty, but I neither have that one installed nor use it. On my PC, I use either grpn or units. More often, I pull out my HP 48G+.

GRPN for anyone else who doesn't know it: http://lashwhip.com/grpn.html

What I meant to say is that, if one uses a featureful calculator like qalc, then you get unit conversion included without needing two separate utilities. Of course, if you've used a(n obscure) calculator for decades then it may be easier to learn to use a separate unit convertor instead

In my usage, GNU units appears to be more featureful than qalc. For example I noticed that qalc lacks many definitions that I often use, such as energy density (eg. "gasoline"), mass density (eg. "golddensity"), energy units (eg. "therm"), astronomy (eg. "earthradius", "solarmass"), etc. And GNU units works just fine as a calculator.

So, from my viewpoint, qalc is the "separate utility" that I don't need ;-)

I wouldn't exactly call the HP "obscure", but it does support unit calculations too. And "units" is more than plenty when I want infix operations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com