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Fun trick: turn your phone to landscape mode while in Calculator and you get 26 digits instead of 9.
by markelliot 11y ago
Fun trick: turn your phone to landscape mode while in Calculator and you get 26 digits instead of 9.
- bottled_poe 11y ago26? I get 15 digits before it switches to exponent representation. This is on iPhone 5s running iOS 8.4.
- eridius 11y ago15 decimal digits around is the approximate limit for a 64-bit IEEE floating-point number, which is what the built-in Calculator uses (most non-integral math done on computers uses either 32-bit of 64-bit IEEE floating-point numbers). The exponential notation is because floating-point numbers can represent absurdly large values, it just is limited on precision. So you can represent 10^31, you just can't represent 10^31 + 1.
- sneak 11y agoWhy should the user of a calculator care how the numbers are represented internally? More importantly, why should they be forced to? It's a bug.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 11y agoWell, what if these users you speak of are trying to accomplish more than just homework?
- cbhl 11y agoSome users do expect arbitrary precision for basic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division) since the Calculator app that comes with Windows does it[0]. [0] http://blog.codinghorror.com/if-you-dont-change-the-ui-nobody-notices/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/if-you-dont-change-the-ui-nobod...
- markelliot 11y agoYep, typo, 16 not 26.