• FishFace@piefed.social
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    6 hours ago

    The only reason we’re still talking about the old textbook is because you said that something never happens which, in fact, has happened. I’m glad though that I can now honestly say “I never make mistakes” because all mistakes I’ve made are in the past, which we know such a present-tense sentence has no bearing on, because the present tense concerns only this current moment and no others!

    I never make mistakes, I never eat or drink, I never breathe (holding my breath as I write, you see), I never move, but never stay still! Well you’ve opened up a whole new genre of nonsense poetry! I assume you’d really agree that I am never wrong - right?

    Now, it’s strange you didn’t take up my offer to show this calculator of yours (that you were so proud of that you tried to insert it into a conversation about a different one) so come on, show me a picture of it! Or better yet, a video of you typing in 2+3×5=. I can hardly admit that I was wrong about my general statement about basic calculators if I can’t even confirm that yours exists. My offer stands, even if you still want to insist that my freebie calculator is a “niche” one (what niche are you even saying the are used in? You never said. And have you given up on calling them “chain calculators”?)

    Nothing to say about the nonexistent stack depth of the Sinclair Executive huh? Guess you finally checked out the spec sheet for its chip and found out how many bytes of memory it had. You get a hint of this in the manual, because it says (pg 6), “a problem such as (a+b)c + (d+e)f cannot be done as a simple calculation, it must be split into two parts.” There is no reason that it would need to be split if the calculator had a stack, as it could store (a+b)c on the stack while the user entered (d+e)f. It can’t though, because it doesn’t have a stack. You have no explanation for why this calculator could not perform this calculation without splitting it.

    Now, you’ve done a silly with the software calculators there, you see, we’re talking about order of operations, not how calculators render implicit multiplication. We can get to your la-la beliefs on the latter at some point, but you really ought to keep these things straight in your mind.

    But for the sake of clarity, I’ll rephrase: you have no sane explanation for why scientific mode tends to obey a different order of operations than basic mode on software calculators. I do, and it’s because they’re emulating basic, four-function calculators which had no stack.