Some Calc Features

I haven’t written about Emacs Calc for a while but I find myself using it all the time. It’s one of the lesser known secrets of Emacs and that’s too bad. You can use it as a quick calculator in the minibuffer or you can leverage its considerable advanced features which come close to rivaling those of dedicated systems like Macsyma and Mathematica.

Florian Adamsky has a nice post that highlights a couple of Calc’s functionalities. He demonstrates Calc’s ability to work with numbers in different bases and perform not just arithmetical operations but logical ones as well. He also mentions the extensible units systems that allows you to define and work with your own units. Very handy for problems in unusual domains.

As Adamsky says, he’s mostly interested in demonstrating the factors that are of use to his programming activities but Calc is much more than a programmers’ calculator. If you haven’t explored it, you really should give it a look. It probably can’t replace Mathematica but it can allow you to solve all sorts of mathematical problems—including symbolic ones—without leaving Emacs. And not leaving Emacs is, of course, one of our major goals¹.

UPDATE: Added missing link to Adamsky’s post