HP calcs are really not that accurate..

[Claudio L.]

(12-03-2017 02:31 AM)AlexFekken Wrote:  My previoius post reminded me of literally the first two basic principles that I learned when I started studying physics (and mathematics) at university in 1976:

1 - a number is totally meaningless if you don't specify its units
2 - a number is also totally meaningless if you don't specify its error margin

Totally meaningless without units?
That's not the physics they taught me.
The error margin I agree, if you stick to physics. When you get to engineering, it's combined with many other uncertainty factors into a global safety factor, so it's not necessary to repeat and analyze each result's error margin, we know roughly what it is, and combined with all the other things that can go wrong, we establish what works or not.
No need for a lot of digits precision though, we are talking large percentage factors...

(12-03-2017 02:31 AM)AlexFekken Wrote:  But still, should we not have an abundance of (freely available) tools now to do, for example, interval arithmetic? And should these not be the standard in scientific education by now. Clearly, this is much more fundamental and important than e.g. CAS or graphing capabilties.

And then threads like this would not even exist...

Sounds like a nice challenge... I'll start thinking about this, you might see it implemented in 6 months or so in... [that project I mentioned a million times].