Euler Identity in Home

[jebem]

(04-05-2014 08:44 PM)ColinJDenman Wrote:  These older calculator results are essentially what I was expecting to see. If a 30/40 year old non CAS non Exact calculator can display the goods, why do you not expect the same from a 400Mhz ARM with 32MB of RAM?

I was tempted to ask for a poll of old HPs on the general forum, asking for the calculation of sin(pi) in radians with max Sci format display. On real hardware, since I don't know how the various emulators work.

Plain and simple truth (to me): I expect better, not worse after 30 years. And no amout of telling me to use CAS or the limits of BCD (which isn't limited in the way that IEEE floats are) is likely to change my mind.

Yap, I have made myself the same question over and over, when looking to the results from a HP-50G and now from a HP-Prime.
Apparently, what the classic 70's calculators are doing is to round internally to Zero when the difference is below a specific value. If this is true, then they were "faking" the calculation a bit. Probably this kind of algorithms are still used in other low cost calculators, who knows.

By the way, I have the real calculators with me, so the above posted results are from physical calculators from my modest collection.
I am into electronics and physics as a hobby now, so mathematics are needed here and there, and I have using calculators since the 70's in school (Casio and HP).