As some of you know, learning more about about calc has been on my TODO list for sometime (that’s literally true—it’s in my agenda). I last wrote about it just last week. I’ve finally stopped procrastinating and starting learning calc.
I began by reading the first of the three manual sections, Getting Started. This section gives a brief demonstration of how calc works and highlights some of its capabilities. Like those who came before me, I was left in awe. I knew it was quite capable but had no idea how capable.
One of the big items for me is arbitrary-size arithmetic. It seems I’m always fiddling around with large numbers and native 64-bit integers simply aren’t big enough for a lot of what I do. That’s why I usually bring up a Lisp REPL for my calculations—the big int arithmetic. I’m not going to give up my Lisp REPL, of course, but for quick calculations calc seems like a real win.
My next step is to tackle Part 2, Tutorial. As I work through that, I’ll probably make occasional posts of interesting things I discover. So far, my only regret is that it took me so long to get started. If you have to do non-trivial calculations and use Lisp, or Python, or something similar, you really should give at least the first part of the calc manual a read. It may suggest a new—and sometimes better—approach.
If reading the manual seems too arduous, Karthik C has a nice video that shows off some of calc‘s capabilities. It’s just short of 49 minutes so you’ll have to schedule some time. Very much worth your time though.