| From: | Armin |
| Date: | 29 Sep 2000 at 03:54:35 |
| Subject: | Re: To sum it up |
On 27-Sep-2000, at 18:35:42, Neil Bothwick wrote:
> Simon Archer said,
>> Using the standard Workbench 'Calculator' program enter in 561.27 - 561.22
>> and see what the results are.
> What were you doing to discover this? Surely it's quicker to work this
> out yourself than run a calculator program :-O
For a short period eight years ago I taught land surveying at a technical
college. There was a large number of mature students there because of the
depression, the rest came straight out of grammar school.
It was interesting to observe how the younger students were totally
dependant on their calculators, even for simple tasks like adding and
subtracting numbers.
The mature students on the other hand performed these tasks the old way
using their own brain, and they did this much quicker than the younger
students.
Also it became clear when correcting test papers that the mature students
displayed a sense of proportion that many of the other students lacked.
Frequently the younger students would get results out by an order of
magnitude. That rarely happened to the mature students.
For sure, calculators are necessary for trig and log functions, where we
used tables in the old days. But for the four basic types of calculation,
I believe using your own brain is good for you. The ability to do quick
estimates in ones head is often of great help out in the real world.
Now, I only did this temporary job to help the department head, a friend
of mine. He also is partner in a surveying company, and at that time
they were busy with a contract in Southeast Asia. They had developed
their own computer programs over a period of more than twenty years,
but ran into problems on this very large scale job.
To cut a long story short, in the end they found that the problems were
related to the algorithms used when converting between floating numbers
and their ASCII representation.
This could well be the problem with the SYS:Tools/Calculator program also.
One cannot always rely on the standard routines of compiler systems
or on the OS runtime library functions.
Regards,
Armin
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