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Yes, from time to time. Mostly when doing math "homework". ("homework" as I'm not in a class, but I do a bit of Algebra or Precalc or Calc or whatever every oth

Yes, from time to time. Mostly when doing math "homework". ("homework" as I'm not in a class, but I do a bit of Algebra or Precalc or Calc or whatever every other day or so for a refresher). I have a fairly substantial collection of handheld calculators, from my old Sharp EL506A that I bought in high-school, a couple of Casio models, a couple of HP's, a TI-85, and a few TI-86 / TI-84 / TI-89 ones, to my latest addition, a TI NSpire CAS. What I reach for most often is a TI-89 Titanium. I'll occasionally also pull out my TI-85 (with the OS/2 sticker on the cover!) just out of nostalgia. ~~ Moving beyond the original question as posed, and just getting into the more general topic of "calculating tools" and what not... If I'm on my laptop and I need to do some quick calculating, I generally just fire up R, Octave, Maxima, or Python in a terminal session, or use bc, depending on what I need to do. As a convenience, I have a script in ~/bin named "bc" that looks like this: #!/bin/bash echo "scale=5;"$1 | /bin/bc -l So I can easily do calculations like this: $> bc 3+4 7 If I actually want an interactive bc session, I have an alias defined like alias bci='/bin/bc -i' And then I usually have a Wolfram Alpha tab open as well, if I'm doing "math stuff". I actually just broke down and signed up for a paid Alpha subscription. Not something I thought I'd ever do, but it's useful enough that I finally bit the bullet.

bee_rider 3y ago
On the topic of silly little scripts that help with math stuff, I’ve put in my ~/bin directory a script called ‘doc’ which does octave —eval “doc $@“ So I can just pop open a new terminal and type something like “doc bicgstab” to go directly to their documentation (I prefer their terminal documentation interface to the gui one, but it is inconvenient to have it take over my in-progress session). On the topic of bc, I assume it is just a result of it being an old Unix program from the days when an FPU was not assumed, but the need to pass the -l flag to get floats seems kind of silly nowadays.

bee_rider 3y ago

On the topic of silly little scripts that help with math stuff, I’ve put in my ~/bin directory a script called ‘doc’ which does octave —eval “doc $@“ So I can just pop open a new terminal and type something like “doc bicgstab” to go directly to their documentation (I prefer their terminal documentation interface to the gui one, but it is inconvenient to have it take over my in-progress session). On the topic of bc, I assume it is just a result of it being an old Unix program from the days when an FPU was not assumed, but the need to pass the -l flag to get floats seems kind of silly nowadays.