Sharp EL-W506T vs. Sharp EL-W516T

[rprosperi]

(11-19-2019 04:19 PM)Pjwum Wrote:  As far as I have seen the Sharp doesn't offer default settings for its integration algorithm, as Bob asked. You have to - optionally - make an educated guess for n every time you start an integration instead of specifying your required eps. Of course this is beyond any high school level.

When I was learning this stuff, it was hammered into me that you need to consider both the numbers and the nature of the 'stuff' you are calculating, in order to make informed and hopefully proper decisions about things like number of iterations, epsilon for determining you've gone 'far enough' and there is no point in continuing, etc.

One of the examples used then was not too dissimilar from the above (i.e. space calculations of some type) just to see if people would use the nominal 1E-07 as epsilon as is typically taught, clearly inappropriate for situations involving millions or billions of units, but bait just waiting for the student to plug-in the same values he/she used the last time. Caught me and taught a good lesson.

As you say, this is all well past what a high school student should be expected to understand or even spend time on, but it is interesting the various manufacturers implement different approaches to insulate users from having to think about this stuff and just bang in the equation and hit RUN.

This has been an interesting and insightful thread, who would have guessed. Thanks to those who contributed and by all means keep the discussion going.