After writing about Florian Adamsky’s post on acronyms in AUCTeX,
I snooped around on his site and came across a nice post on Emacs Calc
from a programmer’s and computer scientist’s point of view. As regular
readers know, I’ve been working to increase my calc-fu lately so I
read the post with interest.
Adamsky demonstrates some of the Calc functions that are useful to
programmers and computer scientists. This includes such things as
entering and displaying numbers in various radixes and performing the
standard logical operations on (the usually binary representation
of) numbers. He even shows how to add a new “units” representation to
Calc—in this case bits/bytes/bits per second.
Calc is a large subsystem and famously hard to master but worth the
effort. It’s been described as a “poor man’s Mathematica.” It’s not
nearly as powerful as Mathematica, of course, but it’s surprising how
many things it can do. If you’re a programmer/computer scientist and
an Emacs user you should spend a little time investigating Calc. It
really can make your life easier. An easy way to get started is to
read Adamsky’s post. It covers only a small slice of Calc but will
give you an idea of its power.