Re:FRINK! (Score 1)

Full Disclosure: I'm the author of Frink and saw links to this discussion in my referrer log. Frink is an interactive calculator, but it's also a Turing-complete programming language, which makes it provably more powerful than Google calc. It tracks units of measure through all calculations, and runs under a GUI or command-line or applet or HTML page, and even runs on a variety of handheld devices.

• Arbitrary-precision math, including huge integers and floating-point numbers, rational numbers, complex numbers, and intervals.
• Date/time math (add offsets to dates, find out intervals between times,) and timezone conversions.
• Calculates historical buying power of the U.S. dollar and British pound.
• Calculates exchange rates between most of the world's currencies.
• Powerful Perl-like regular expression capabilities and text processing.
• Supports Interval Arithmetic (also known as Interval Computations) in calculations, allowing you to automagically calculate error bounds and uncertainties in all of your calculations.
• High quality graphics, including rendering to various bitmap and scalable vector formats.
• Frink is a full-fledged programming language with arrays, dictionaries, sets, functions, loops, even object-oriented programming and self-evaluation.

Some of the major issues with the Google calculator are that its units aren't well-researched nor up-to-date, (e.g. acre, furlong, township, rod, are all defined wrong, and so is the "once in a blue moon" example above because a blue moon doesn't have a fixed frequency of occurrence,) you can't set variables nor save your results anywhere, so if your calculation is more than a single line, it becomes very unsuitable indeed. The thing that I find is the deal-breaker in the Google calculator is that it invents its own rules of precedence and ignores centuries of mathematical convention. For example, if you do something like:

1 / 3.1416 foot

and then decide to get a few more significant digits and change it to:

1 / pi foot

You get wildly different results, not even having the same units of measure!

Even worse is its handling of something as simple as the two calculations:

1/2 second
-1/2 second

Which give results having entirely different units of measure! Yikes. But, with respect to Google, we have very different goals. Their goal is to be entirely stateless so any of their servers around the world can perform the calculation without regard to any calculations done before. But you generally *want* your calculator to have some state (e.g. saved results) so even a 1970s era pocket calculator with a memory button is usually more useful in that regard.