One of the least appreciated features of Emacs is Calc. At it’s most basic it provides an RPN calculator much like a traditional HP scientific calculator. It’s reasonably easy to learn this functionality but Calc offers much, much more. It can, for example, find the roots of functions, solve simultaneous equations, do vector operations, (symbolically) differentiate and integrate functions, and many other operations as well.
The problem is that a normal person who isn’t using Calc constantly won’t be able to remember how to invoke the appropriate commands. A little bit more than a month ago, I wrote about Charles Choi’s casual, a porcelain for Calc to help the casual user navigate the arcane Calc command language.
Choi is back with some improvements that lets us painlessly make use of some of Calc’s more advanced features. He shows you how to name a function and then operate on it by finding its roots, its derivatives, its integral, and a few other things.
I haven’t played with casual too much since I wrote about it because I already knew those elementary operations but now I can see myself using it more because I definitely haven’t committed those advanced operations to memory. Choi’s post provides some detailed examples of using those advanced features so be sure to take a look at it.
My hope is that casual will finally bring Calc to the average Emacs user. Many of those users haven’t done any Calculus since they left their university so being able to easily make those calculations with Emacs is a real advantage. We all owe Choi a vote of thanks.