excellent job, Brandon :)

to everyone else, now, aren't you glad he's not selling this app? =P

AYE!

Great job! Are you planning on releasing the source? I'd be interested it in porting it to the 86. I've wanted to write one of these for a while, but never had the time. Does it do pretty print? Are there any plans for that? I think pretty print is incredibly useful, as it allows you to quickly visually verify that a given representation is what you intended.

I second the motion. David is a really awesome well-known asm programmer, so I know the port would be done very well.

Yep, the source would be nice...

This is a great program, and i mean no offense to the author, but isnt this program like cheating for students in algebra and calculus. There is a reason that teachers do not let students use 89's and 92's, and now this program has broken this barrier.

Yes there is a reason teachers do not permit the 89 or 92. They are two lazy ask students to show all work and actually check it too. If teachers checked to see that work was completely shown, then there is no great disadvantage to technology which does this. Much more can be gained from checking your answers with a calculator than guessing your first answer is correct.

You're right in a sense and wrong in another one... It's possible to do a proper correction if there is a small number of students, but this is normally not the case. But e. g. here at the university there are 15000 people learning. The faculty of electric engineering is the largest one with about 1000 students in one year. Now if we want a test to be corrected in a week, it's practically impossible to do that properly, because of the lacking labour force (and free worktime). So students are not allowed to use ANY graphing calculator (in theory, hehe).

sucks to go to your college...I'm sure your college is swell, but they need to take a reality check. For one you pay them money...so if grading is hard tough shit, they pay teaching assistants and graders to do that kind of thing. Second...college is supposed to prepare you for the REAL world. Guess what calculators exists in the REAL world. I use one everyday at work. FYI i'm a EE student at the university of texas and apparently my professors see nothing wrong with using an aid to make sure you get the problem correct. In life it often doesn't matter in what manner you come to the answer but moreso that the answer is correct. Better to be safe than to really screw things up. Brandon, I see nothing wrong with this type of APP.

Look, I'm Hungarian, and I study at the Technical University of Budapest. I don't have to pay anything, because here the state finances the first diploma for every citizen. :) And it might sound odd for you, but we even have to write syntax error free programs on paper in a very limited amount of time (90 minutes) - Pascal, C, C++ (!), Java (!), assembly etc. It doesn't matter how much you know when you enter, you are a skilled programmer after one year. Same thing goes with calculators: first you have to learn how thing work without any equipment, THEN you can gradually replace the most frequently used tasks to be performed by machines. This is essential. After specialisation, of course, there are no such limits, since doing every pitiful operation on paper would be unrealistic. But until then, you learn to apply them very effectively.

<<Same thing goes with calculators: first you have to learn how thing work without any equipment, THEN you can gradually replace the most frequently used tasks to be performed by machines. This is essential. After specialisation, of course, there are no such limits, since doing every pitiful operation on paper would be unrealistic. But until then, you learn to apply them very effectively.>>

Sounds like good policy :)

At least it works really well in practice.

Hey Cullen, you are at The University of Texas at Austin? I'm there too as a first year CS student. We've got to go hang out sometime... As for something on topic, I will add that my Calculus 2 professor and TA's for the discussion sections do not let us use a graphing calculator at all. Sometimes a numerical calculator is needed for computations, however. I expect it to be that way in math courses from now on.

Jason Kovacs
Detached Solutions Staff

I've met a few people up here at Michigan Tech who are on this site, too. One was in the ACZ, and we talked to each other all hour through every CS class...

BTW, anyone else here from Midland, MI or the Michigan Tech area?

w00t.

Mike McElroy
Same old jackass

Jason,
Cool man...send me an e-mail sometime. I'm sure you are back at home for the holidays right now, but when you get into to town we can hang out. I've got a few friends in CS, they may have been in some of your classes. My Calc class was M408D and maybe my professor was just different, but he was more concerned with us learning what he was teaching and not with us being able to integrate a function. Just a matter of perspective I suppose, I definately understadn the need for people to learn the fundamentals before just using a program. Although I think it would be hard to use this APP for a real world application without any knowledge of calculus. You couldn't tell someone to find max volume of a box and then hand them the calc with this APP and have them magically know what to do, so I do not believe it is cheating in the slightest. There is no reason for someone to sit there and toil over some boring differentiation when a calc could do it for them. As long as they know how to solve the original problem...why do the grunt work?

Look forward to hanging out Jason.

Yay! no more thinking in math class!

When do you have to work with eigenvectors and such? It'd be fun to know those thingys...

They're used a lot in physics...

Linear Algebra! Very useful in matrix theory...mmmm....