[zelon88]

To be honest I read all the materials, 85% of the blog post, and your website and you still have not told me WHY software calculators are wrong.

You drone on and on and on. I'm 15 minutes into this rant of yours and I know all your personal preferences about pocket calculators and software calculators and yet no evidence to suggest why your design is actually better. No evidence to suggest that existing calculators are incorrect.

Can you please provide a real TL;DR where you provide hard proof that popular software calculators are incorrect?

[shhsshs]

The TLDR as I understand it:

- Most software calculators take up too much space. You don't need buttons on the screen, your keyboard already has the buttons.

- Software calculators don't often give good feedback of what digits/buttons are being pressed. Physical calculators keep the keys and the display in the same small visual space: you can see the buttons you're pressing and the screen at the same time, and you have good haptic feedback. Software calculators force you to trust yourself to type the exact numbers/operations you want, or look back and forth between your keyboard and the screen, which is slow. The other alternative is using the mouse to click every button, which is also slow.

And three of the requirements the author lists for a "good" software calculator:

- The calculator should not compute until you validate the full expression.

- The calculator should display the expression during input, and allow you to correct any typing error you notice.

- The calculator should display the expression that has actually been evaluated.

(end of TLDR)

Now my own opinion: an RPN calculator with a visible stack is more than enough to solve the problems that motivate points 1 + 2.

[chacha21]

RPN is just an option (provided by Chalk). The "minimalist" GUI is just the introduction of the full article. You have to reach <https://chachatelier.fr/chalk/article/chalk.html#toc-36> to go deeper into numerical problems of usual softwares.

Once again, Chalk is not the best software ever, it is just what I have to build myself to fix the problems I usually encounter. Not to say that all other softwares are equally bad, but to my knowledge, none of them will address as much limitations at the same time.

[tqi]

Using spotlight search to do calculations meets all 3 requirements, no?

[chacha21]

Let's say that : if you do not use arithmetic interval, at some point your floating point computations will be wrong and misleading if you do not carry information about how much bits are garbage. Chalk does that.