Many years ago, ~2009ish, a friend pointed out that Calculator.app was giving the wrong sign when raising a positive number to a negative exponent. It turned out to be a bug in CFNumber affecting virtually every app.
I noticed the other day that you can type "1+1 sq ft in sq in=" and macOS will helpfully autocomplete the answer: 1,694.0031 square inches. Which is completely wrong. 2 square feet is 288 square inches. It took a few minutes to solve the puzzle of what the hell it is doing.
So take caution trusting Apple's math, which naturally is up to 2x better³—for some value of x.
There is a perfectly cromulent grammar for a unit-aware calculator:
<expression without units> [<unit> [in <unit>]]
<expression with units> [in <unit>]
"1+2 feet in meters" and "1 foot + 1 meter" are both unambiguous. There is no order of operations in terms of how the units bind. The expression "1 foot + 1" is appropriately invalid.
Of course the appropriate care must be paid to interpreting "in" correctly as either a unit or a keyword.
Its been missing touch input for over 6 years now, still cannot believe their dev teams do not have professional pride to fix such an embaressing flaw.
I don't know if xcancel is getting hugged to death or blocks all of Canada or something, but I've been getting connection refused every time I've clicked on one of their links here.
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I noticed the other day that you can type "1+1 sq ft in sq in=" and macOS will helpfully autocomplete the answer: 1,694.0031 square inches. Which is completely wrong. 2 square feet is 288 square inches. It took a few minutes to solve the puzzle of what the hell it is doing.
So take caution trusting Apple's math, which naturally is up to 2x better³—for some value of x.
I had the same issue with a different calculation. The answer was wrong.
I thought it looks weird because I put a space after the = and the autocomplete does not add that.
The order of operations here is quite ambiguous. It’s not obvious even to a human reader how you would expect this to be interpreted.
Of course the appropriate care must be paid to interpreting "in" correctly as either a unit or a keyword.
Fun puzzle. Spoilers ahead:
It seems it’s considering the first 1, and not the second, to be in square meters. “(1+1) sq ft in sq in” works.
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If you type too quick, it misses numbers.
If you type too many times “+” it add too many times
If you try to use it as old standalone calculator, things does not calculate right.
It is hard to clear numbers.
Just so stupid.
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