HP Forums - great new features

It seems to me that tim, cyrille, and Bernard have really gone all out trying to get as many feature requests in as possible. There are some things that I recall being requested some time back that are now in the firmware (like the Probability and Polynomial Wizards). A huge thanks to all the effort that they have put in.

There are a number of nice new features that I didn't see mentioned by anyone yet. Some of these still need a tweak or two, but looks very promising. I'd like to make comments about some, so I'll lump them together here.

Quote:9. Add save/load of work in home

This is a very useful feature. Unfortunately, it doesn't always load correctly and frequently crashes the calculator. I'll look forward to using this when the kinks are worked out.

Quote:10. Add triangle surface calculation in triangle solver

I remember when someone asked for this feature, some criticized the request as being a waste of programming effort, but I think it rounds out the Triangle Solver App nicely. I was using the Triangle Solver just today to check a student's work.

I wasn't sure what "surface calculation" meant at first, but then I figured it must be area. The word "surface" is usually used for a 3d solid. Perhaps the word "Area" could be placed above the S=value.

If the entered values for the sides are impossible (a=1, b=2, c=4), the area calculation displays:
S=NaN

I doubt that any of my students would know the meaning of NaN. Perhaps it would be better to display "no solution".

Or perhaps the words "Area" and "no solution" were intentionally not used so as to avoid the need for translations. If so, then leaving it blank would be better than NaN.

Quote:20. optional arguments left, right, center, tail for normald_icdf (also for Student, Fisher and Chi Square)

I think these might have been my requests, so thank you.

The use is not documented, so in case anyone is interested, you put the arguments in single brackets, such as

normald_icdf(600,100,0.5,'center')
student_icdf(5,0.01,'right')
chisquare_icdf(10,0.05,'left')
fisher_icdf(10,12,0.05,'tail')

There is a display error though. When used with these new optional arguments, the student_icdf() and chisquare_icdf() functions do not display correctly in the history.

student_icdf(5,0.2,'left') is displayed as
STUDENT_ICDF(STUDENT_ICDF(5,0.2),'left')

and chisquare_icdf(10,0.95,'center') is displayed as
CHISQUARE_ICDF(CHISQUARE_ICDF(10,0.95),'center')

Interestingly, the fisher_icdf() displays in the history in lower case, but the other three are in upper case.

(05-06-2021 05:41 PM)Wes Loewer Wrote: [ -> ]
Quote:20. optional arguments left, right, center, tail for normald_icdf (also for Student, Fisher and Chi Square)

Also, these optional arguments are only for CAS, not Home.

(05-06-2021 04:59 PM)Wes Loewer Wrote: [ -> ]
Quote:10. Add triangle surface calculation in triangle solver

I remember when someone asked for this feature, some criticized the request as being a waste of programming effort, but I think it rounds out the Triangle Solver App nicely. I was using the Triangle Solver just today to check a student's work.

I wasn't sure what "surface calculation" meant at first, but then I figured it must be area. The word "surface" is usually used for a 3d solid. Perhaps the word "Area" could be placed above the S=value.

If the entered values for the sides are impossible (a=1, b=2, c=4), the area calculation displays:
S=NaN

I doubt that any of my students would know the meaning of NaN. Perhaps it would be better to display "no solution".

Or perhaps the words "Area" and "no solution" were intentionally not used so as to avoid the need for translations. If so, then leaving it blank would be better than NaN.

If NaN is displayed as "blank" , how would your students Google "blank" to find out what the answer means, and why it is there?
If they Google NaN they can see what the answer means.
If it can display" no solutions" in their language too, that is a bonus - it explains why the answer is Nan, not just what the answer is.

Perhaps clearer than NaN is to always return a list of solutions, with an empty list obviously meaning no solutions were found.

(10-04-2022 06:53 AM)StephenG1CMZ Wrote: [ -> ]
(05-06-2021 04:59 PM)Wes Loewer Wrote: [ -> ]I doubt that any of my students would know the meaning of NaN. Perhaps it would be better to display "no solution".

Or perhaps the words "Area" and "no solution" were intentionally not used so as to avoid the need for translations. If so, then leaving it blank would be better than NaN.

If NaN is displayed as "blank" , how would your students Google "blank" to find out what the answer means, and why it is there?
If they Google NaN they can see what the answer means.
If it can display" no solutions" in their language too, that is a bonus - it explains why the answer is Nan, not just what the answer is.

I really like NaN plus "No solutions" if possible.

Googling NaN opens a door into the wide world of IEEE Floating Point, from there to floating point representations in general, and from there in to Applied Numerics. You might inspire somebody to dig more deeply. And even if you don't, it gives you the opportunity to explain that floating point numbers in a machine are different from the continuum of Real numbers in pure mathematics... i.e. explain a little of what NaN's really are, and why they exist.

Just my $0.02 worth.

--johnb

(10-04-2022 06:53 AM)StephenG1CMZ Wrote: [ -> ]If NaN is displayed as "blank" , how would your students Google "blank" to find out what the answer means, and why it is there?
If they Google NaN they can see what the answer means.
If it can display" no solutions" in their language too, that is a bonus - it explains why the answer is Nan, not just what the answer is.

At the top it says "No solution with given data" which seems pretty clear to me. Leaving S= blank is consistent with leaving all the other fields blank. If you're going to put NaN on S, then it seems like NaN should go on all of the blank fields.

You could just as well have "S=imaginary" with the idea that students might be motivated to Google that as well. There's a place for prompting students to look up topics, but I don't think the Triangle Solver App is it. Just my opinion of course.