How do you calculate?

[Dov Grobgeld]

Regarding doing approximate answers in the head, it doesn't always work as
is told in an anecdote
of the books about the late physists Richard Feynmann. It tells the story of
how he used to brag that any arithmetic problem that could be stated in in
ten seconds he could give an approximate answer up to 10% to in 30seconds.
This all worked out for a while until someone said to him

sine of a million

which managed to shut up even Richard Feynmann.

Cheers,
Dov

On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 16:41, shlomo bauer <shlomobauer at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Sammy is wondering (for years) how unix/linux users do simple calculations.
>
> Many people write their own calculator language - in the tradition of
> hoc.  Anyone who actually
> enters in the code for hoc will discover something quite interesting.
>
> Other people use languages like Nickle (http://nickle.org/); I
> typically use haskell and in the past, I used ocaml and further in the
> past, I used sml - still my favorite.
>
> Another approach is to use a spreadsheet.  You can compute recursive
> functions using !.
>
> My favorite,  for "simple" cacluations, is to compute an approximate
> answer and to do so, I don't generally need anything except a sense of
> the scale of the numbers.
>
> Shlomo
>
> _______________________________________________
> Linux-il mailing list
> Linux-il at cs.huji.ac.il
> http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/pipermail/linux-il/attachments/20100520/0d2361a8/attachment.html>