REQUEST: Significant Digit Calculator

[Claudio L.]

(01-24-2018 08:47 PM)Tim Wessman Wrote:  This type of thing in my experience is a "good idea", but in practice has been implemented wrong. The system simply assumes your numbers are correct up to the last digit in all case. In reality, the user needs to be able to specify where the error is (some numbers won't have uncertainty, or varying levels of uncertainty) and the amount of the error. Thus these become a simple "black box" thing that doesn't actually aid understanding or be useful.

The better solution is to enable interval math, and that is something we have on the long term goals...

I agree 100%, except the "good idea" part. The machine is tasked with adding the numbers, let the human evaluate the confidence intervals, unless like you said, you can explicitly specify the error in each and every number you type on the calculator, and use interval math (which would slow down your use of the calculator by a lot).
Based on the original poster, if you type 5/2 the result should be 2 and not 2.5, since the calculator would assume your 5 and your 2 are only accurate to the integer digits. That would be disastrous on any calculation outside of a school environment.