Default angle mode

[Eric Smith]

The first thing I have to do after resetting a calculator for any reason is switch to radians mode. Just out of curiosity, how many people here would be upset if the default angle mode was radians rather than degrees?

Or we could make the default angle mode grads, and annoy nearly everyone. :-)

[Harald]

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The first thing I have to do after resetting a calculator for any reason is switch to radians mode. Just out of curiosity, how many people here would be upset if the default angle mode was radians rather than degrees?

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That is the same for me, and I would welcome that.

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Or we could make the default angle mode grads, and annoy nearly everyone. :-)

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LOL :) Out of curiosity, is there anyone here who uses it?

[Marcus von Cube, Germany]

Gradian / Grad / Gon was an attempt to extend the metric system to angles. The WikiPedia article states that it has its origins in France. Nowadays it's only in use by surveyors.

[Paul Dale]

Bring back the metric calendar....

- Pauli

[Ángel Martin]

Nah, much better to change time so that hours have 100 minutes and these 100 seconds...

[Mike (Stgt)]

Use BMT (Biel Mean Time).

Ciao.....Mike

[Harald]

Then a day would have 8.64 Hours. Hmm, not sure if I could get used to that :)

[Fred Lusk]

I'm a civil engineer with a modest background in surveying. To my knowledge, grads and radians are never used by US surveyors, only degrees. The last time I used a radian in battle was in college calculus. I've never used a grad.

In the US (and probably most other parts of the world), angles are almost always expressed in the form degrees-minutes-seconds (e.g. 12°34'56.7"). Bearings (for direction) are expressed in the form [North or South]-degrees-minutes-seconds-[East or West] (e.g. S 12°34'56.7" E). Decimal degree angles and decimal degree bearings are used occasionally. Azimuths are also used once in a while, in both decimal and DMS form. Azimuths are angles measured clockwise from North (e.g. the previous bearing would be Az 167°25'03.3"). However, the last time I personally used an azimuth was in my 2nd year surveying course in college as part of doing star and sun shots. This application of astrometry was sometimes used in the pre-GPS days to establish your location on the Earth.

I suspect that when it comes to angles, far more people use degrees than radians, which is why it is the default on HP calcs. I wish Excel defaulted to degrees.

[Walter B]

While I concur with most of your post, the following ...

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In the US (and probably most other parts of the world), angles are almost always expressed in the form degrees-minutes-seconds (e.g. 12°34'56.7").

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... does not apply here. Angles are almost always expressed in decimal degrees here d:-)

[Maximilian Hohmann]

Hi!

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... does not apply here. Angles are almost always expressed in decimal degrees here d:-)

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Not "almost always" in my environment (aviation) unfortunately. There is a big mess between degress mintes seconds (.decimals) and degrees minutes.decimals depending on the source of data, even between different national sources.
The flight management computer is built in the States and only accepts DMS.decimals so there is always some (maybe dangerous) potential for error and confusion.

And this is what the angle mode selector of a calculator should look like :-) (please note also the _black_ background and _red_ _luminous_ display...)

[Fred Lusk]

Thanks for the info. I probably should said "possibly some other parts of the world."

[Tim Wessman]

In my time working on surveying stuff, I never ran into any customers who actually used grads. This included plenty of surveyors from Europe and other parts of the world. The argument about "surveyors need grads" really never held any water. The only people who might are artillery captains...don't really have many of those anymore. :-)

TW

[Derek Walker (UK)]

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I'm a civil engineer with a modest background in surveying. To my knowledge, grads and radians are never used by US surveyors, only degrees. The last time I used a radian in battle was in college calculus. I've never used a grad.

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Many years ago, in the early days of scientific calculators, I was a setting-out engineer on the M25 London orbital motorway [1]. One day a colleague and I were setting centre-line for the next stretch of fencing and site clearance, and we spent a frustrating day with nothing tying-in as it should, despite trips back to the office to check our calculations. Eventually we noticed someone had set the slide switch on our shared office Casio calculator to grads. :-(

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I suspect that when it comes to angles, far more people use degrees than radians, which is why it is the default on HP calcs. I wish Excel defaulted to degrees.

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Or even allowed degrees as a user-selected option. My Excel formulae are full of multiplications or divisions by pi()/180.

[1] (for UK readers, just east of where Clacket Lane services now are)

[Fred Lusk]

Working in grads and not knowing it would certainly make for a frustrating day.

When I was in college in the late 1970s, I spent one very hot summer on a survey crew. For several weeks, I and another college student were assigned to a project to retrace and remonument the 1940s-era federal government boundary around Pine Flat Reservoir in the foothills east of Fresno, CA. The boundary was intended to follow a contour that was 10 feet above the high water level in the reservoir. Unfortunately, our party chief was not the sharpest knife in the drawer and daily high temps averaged about 105°F (41°C). Oh, and due to drought conditions from the previous winter, the reservoir was over 100 feet below high water so we got no cooling effect from the lake.

On our first day in the field the party chief had me searching for a wooden peg monument in the very middle of an unbroken 30-foot-wide slab of granite. I told my party chief that there was no way a wooden peg could ever have been pounded into the granite, but all he could do was scream at me for my incompetence. We checked and we rechecked. We had the correct distance from the previous monument, (~350 feet). We had the correct deflection angle from a reverse of the backsight…that is, until my college buddy (who was holding the instrument end of the chain) took another look at the theodolite and discovered that our party chief was exactly 10 degrees off. With the correct angle, I shifted laterally ~60 feet and found the monument in less than a minute. He didn't apologize.

About two weeks later our traverse ran smack dab through the middle of a 3-foot-diameter pine tree. While the party chief was planning a path around the tree on the steep side slope (about 1.5H:1V), I remarked that a tree that large was probably at least 200 years old and that the original boundary could not possibly have been routed that way (plus, any tree that close to the high water should have been cleared). He said it must have been "a fast-growing tree" and he berated me for "not understanding surveying" and "questioning his professional abilities." However, when I asked to see the field book and the copy of the old gov't survey we were trying to follow, he handed them to me, though he told me I probably wouldn't understand them. As I flipped back through the pages I stumbled across what appeared to be a math error on an angle. A few button pushes on my HP-55 confirmed the error. He has busted an angle four days before by exaclty one degree and had us slowly marching uphill instead of following the coutour. Had the reservoir been full, it would have been obvious. We lost almost the entire four days worth of work. He didn't apologize, though he did get reamed by his boss.

Finally, we were supposed to set signs along the boundary. The signs were to be placed at ~200-foot intervals, 3 feet inside the boundary, and facing out. The signs and posts were about the same size as for stop signs. We had to hand auger the holes, then set the posts in cement. In some cases, we had to carry water and 94-lb sacks of cement up to half a mile. Our party chief screwed up again. He located two day's worth of posts outside the boundary facing in, despite our protests that he was wrong. He didn't apologize, but he was fired that week.

It's funny now. It wasn't funny at the time. :-)

Edited: 5 Dec 2012, 1:36 p.m.

[Derek Walker (UK)]

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It's funny now. It wasn't funny at the time. :-)

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I think that it's that sort of experience that is described as "character-forming", and it's just such painful events that typically stick in the memory long after smooth-running jobs are largely forgotten. Fortunately the passage of time and the glow of nostalgia mellow the grief one felt at the time.

[Andrés C. Rodríguez (Argentina)]

I prefer degrees as first-time default, but the most important thing (absent in older calculators) is a visible indicator of angular mode. From a "real estate" point of view, it seems convenient to keep the GRAD and RAD annunciators, even if the default were RAD.

As long as we have "continuous memory" for these settings, angular mode only needs to be set at first use or because a specific need.

GRAD is good to normalize numbers in the 0-100 range with few keystrokes, for instance to simulate bouncing objects in a game. I never used it for angular or phase measurements.

[Nigel J Dowrick]

The source code for the WP 34S firmware is supplied and freely editable, so minor changes such as default angular mode can be made by users if they are prepared to re-compile the code. Will the source code for this new machine be available in a similar way? Playing with the WP 34S source code has given me almost as much pleasure as using the actual calculator!

Nigel (UK)

[Walter B]

There's a sourceforge project for this as well - but pretty empty so far.

[Marcus von Cube, Germany]

Nigel, are there any contributions worth considering inclusion in the WP 34S?

[Nigel J Dowrick]

Thank you for asking! I've produced 5 modifications:

• the casio-style fraction separator
  
• making the exponent key enter pi if pressed at the start of numeric entry
  
• making 2..3 enter 2/3, rather than 2.0.3
  
• a display mode that only displays a user-selectable number of significant figures, without going into exponent notation unless the number is too large or too small
  
• displaying the contents of the y-register on the dot matrix line
  

I'm reasonably happy about the code; it has been running happily in my calculator for a couple of months now (and I use the calculator a lot!) I'm currently trying to make patch files for it; I could make these available when I'm sure that they're correct. (I coded all five changes together; separating them out, particularly the last two, is proving fiddly.)

Nigel (UK)

[Egan Ford]

I do the same. I would welcome RAD as the default. And it should be annunciated.

[Gerson W. Barbosa]

I prefer DEG as the default angular mode. On the other hand, the change to RAD should require no more than three keystrokes.

[C.Ret]

Hi,

I also prefered DEG as défault mode.
Since I am using my calculator to compute navigational data, expressing in degree is mandatory. Please imagine the trouble if I send instruction to the pilot :

" Prepare your weaponery system, coordinates of your target are N
W . Acknowledge reception. Confirm target identification".

Edited: 2 Dec 2012, 2:11 p.m.

[Maximilian Hohmann]

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...Please imagine the trouble if I send instruction to the pilot : Prepare your weaponery system, coordinates of your target ...

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Please don't tell me that you calculate target coordinates with selfmade software on a pocket calculator? I think I need to dig a shelter in my garden tomorrow!

And regarding the original question/poll: Degrees, please!

[Ethan Conner]

DEG please.

[Mike (Stgt)]

RAD is all I need!

Ciao.....Mike

[Walter B]

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Please don't tell me that you calculate target coordinates with selfmade software on a pocket calculator? I think I need to dig a shelter in my garden tomorrow!

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US-American technology: homegrown but works - with some collateral damage sometimes :-/

[Gerson W. Barbosa]

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And regarding the original question/poll: Degrees, please!

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It looks like this is not a poll, but if it is I would suggest it is ended ASAP. Democracy is great, especially now that we DEGs are winning :-)

"Democracy is when I rule, dictatorship is when YOU do!", Millôr Fernandes :-)

[Dave Shaffer (Arizona)]

Degrees for me

[Paul Dale]

I use degrees and radians about equally, but would prefer the default to be degrees. An on screen indication for degrees mode too is sensible.

- Pauli

[htom trites jr]

Grad I understand and don't think I've ever used except to demonstrate it.


Rad I use not quite half the time.


Deg I use a bit more than half, and wish for D. and DMS. as modes.


There's also the various schemes using bit counts, with and without various codings, scalings, bounds, ... messy. Probably shouldn't do that one.


Changing is annoying, and it doesn't seem to matter much which comes up when I start, I usually have to change it once or twice before I'm done with a session. It's more important that it be displayed and easy to change.

[Bill Carter]

Degrees for me. When I find myself in radians, it usually reminds me to stop, drop, and roll into MathCad or Mathematica.

Bill

[Walter B]

DEG about 75%, RAD 25%, GRAD 0%. And all shall be indicated - I suggest by °, pi, and g, respectively d:-)

[Eric Smith]

I *much* prefer having the annunciator actually say DEG, RAD, or GRAD, rather than the suggested symbols.

The proposed degree symbol makes sense, but it will result in users asking "what's the little zero in the display", just like they do for flags 0-4 of the HP-41. The "g" even more so.

The pi symbol doesn't make much sense to me; if it was 2pi I'd get it instantly.

I think showing 360 or 2pi for degrees and radians might be OK, but I think it's less obvious than simply DEG and RAD.

As high-resolution as the display is, the annunciator could even be the full word.

[Walter B]

Did you ever think about people not speaking English? Then you'd realize why symbols are better. Think of all the other peoples sometimes at least ... d:-)

So 360° and 2pi are more comprehensive than degrees and radians, and g is the international symbol for gon. BTW, please see p. 43 of the WP 34S manual.

Edited: 3 Dec 2012, 3:22 a.m.

[Egan Ford]

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Did you ever think about people not speaking English?

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How many non-English speaking/reading users do you expect? It is not possible to create solution optimized for all.

Edit:

Assuming that you are using a matrix LCD and not a custom display you can probably have a regional settings menu.

Edited: 3 Dec 2012, 12:22 p.m.

[Walter B]

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How many non-English speaking/reading users do you expect? It is not possible to create solution optimized for all.

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May I quote Gerson?

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Democracy is when WE rule - dictatorship is when YOU rule.

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d;-)

[Egan Ford]

Well that didn't answer my question. Regional settings and user prefs can eliminate all personal and regional preference issues.

To address cold reset preferences I would suggest a type of wizard. This is not uncommon for consumer electronics. Defaults such as deg/rad, comma/period, annunciators, etc... would be prompted before initial calculator start.

Oh and don't confuse fundamental equality with market equality.

Edited: 3 Dec 2012, 1:11 p.m.

[Marcus von Cube, Germany]

Egan, the device in question will have a matrix display. Did you see Tim's suggestion to use an angle symbol together the °, ^g and PI symbols? This will solve the problem for most of us.

[Egan Ford]

Yes, but I like yours better with the angle (<) prefixed to remove any ambiguity. I found the aforementioned symbols on their own without the < to be ambiguous lending credibility to the legacy HP conventional DEG/GRAD/RAD.

[Walter B]

Good grief - who has eyes to read, read!

[C.Ret]

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To address cold reset preferences I would suggest a type of wizard. This is not uncommon for consumer electronics. Defaults such as deg/rad, comma/period, annunciators, etc... would be prompted before initial calculator start.

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Egan, you catch it right.
I use several consumer electronics that have such a design, it is a nice solution. You have to set all the parameters only once or occasionally after completed reset or deep crash.
Of course, you also may change any of these setting individually whenever this is needed.

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[...] to use an angle symbol together the °, ^g and PI symbols? This will solve the problem for most of us.

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I agree with Marcus. This will also help interpreting results of trigonometric calculation or entry of angle into other mode than actual selected mode.

For exemple
0.5 ASIN will return 30°, 0.52360^rd, .16667^pi.rd or 33.3333^gr depending of current trig mode.

In the other hand, 30.0875 SIN is interpreted differently depending of trig mode, where 30.0875°, 30° 5’15”, 30°5.25’, 30.4306^gr, 0.167153 ^pi.rd or 0.525126^rd will be unambiguously interpreted in specific trig modes and formats.

Having an angle enunciator (combine or not with trig unit indicator) will also help interpreting result of R->P and P->R. Of any calculator I use these function, I always have to look after the manual instruction (or try dummy value) to remember in which order I have to enter coordinates, distance or angle.

A smart system, may interpret correctly polar coordinates (r, <_ a°) even when incorrectly entered as ( <_ a° , r ) . As well, the result of the conversion of Cartesian coordinate (x,y) will unambiguously return radius r , and angle <_ a° displayed with appropriate enunciators

Edited: 4 Dec 2012, 5:49 a.m.

[Paul Dale]

Seems like you're wanting units attached to results.

- Pauli

[Walter B]

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For exemple
0.5 ASIN will return 30°, 0.52360^rd, .16667^pi.rd or 33.3333^gr depending of current trig mode.

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Just a little remark -

• the second value carries no unit
• the third is times pi
• the last value shall be 33.3333^g since the unit is called gon internationally and the unit symbol was a lower case elevated g.

I recognize units are a difficult topic ;-) And annunciators are a completely different cup of tea.

d:-)

[C.Ret]

Thank you for the correction, using ^gr instead of the I.U symbol is a bad personal habit that comes from intensive use and reading of very old local handbooks (using aged cgs unit system!).

You right, enunciators and units are two different aspects.

One more parameter to take into account is that most of users currently use only one unit/format. Having to specify units/format for each data entry can rapidly became boring and annoying.

Peoples, who regularly have to handle several formats and units, generally have programmed specific subroutines to print out unambiguously results.

[Eric Smith]

Yes, I think about people not speaking English, and I know from experience that they are completely familiar with "DEG" and "RAD" on calculators.

Maybe they shouldn't have to be, but then, there seem to be other functions in the calculator that have English-centric names, the most obvious example being "ENTER", and I haven't heard much complaint about that.

[Egan Ford]

Now you've done it. :-) To be international friendly I guess the ENTER key will have to be:

          |

          |

          |

<---------'

And the alphabet on the keyboard is clearly US(western)-centric. Now what?

Edited: 4 Dec 2012, 6:57 p.m.

[Kiyoshi Akima]

And you need to be able to group digits in fours instead of threes, and provide an ENG-like display mode with exponents as multiples of four.

[Walter B]

See p. 39 of the WP 34S Owner's Manual. Does that grouping in steps of four also work in Japan?

[Paul Dale]

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And you need to be able to group digits in fours instead of threes, and provide an ENG-like display mode with exponents as multiples of four.

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Doing either of these on the 34S would be reasonably straightforward and that is quite a statement given the very high level of complexity of the real number rendering code.

Just wondering what benefits grouping by and exponents of four gives? Or is it cultural?

Exponents being multiples of three match the metric system nicely and I figured this was the purpose of ENG mode. On the other hand, grouping digits by three is kind of arbitrary. It matches English numbering words and more weakly corresponds to the metric units.

- Pauli

[Walter B]

That's cultural. Chinese count in multiples of 1, 10, 100, 1000, and 10000 (yi1, shí, bai3, qian1, wàn). I'll look if I find the picture of a corresponding calculator.

d:-)

[Walter B]

As promised:

[Walter B]

Maybe this calculator needs some explanation, especially the nine blue keys: They correspond to different factors of ten - the bottom right means

shi2 = 10, the next to the left (!) is

bai3 = 100, the next is

qian1 = 1000, then go one row up (!) and find

wan4 = 10000.

Now the mechanics starts: the next key is

shi2 wan4 = 10 x 10000, then

bai3 wan4 = 100 x 10000, then

qian1 wan4 = 1000 x 10000.

For 10000^2, there is another character: yi4 = 10^8.

Then the mechanics repeats:

shi2 yi4 = 10 x 10^8, and would continue with

bai3 yi4 = 100 x 10^8,

qian1 yi4 = 1000 x 10^8, and

wan4 yi4 = 10000 x 10^8.

That shall do for all common man's problems ;-)

d:-)

[Kiyoshi Akima]

Shouldn't the digit separators appear every four digits instead of every three?

[Walter B]

I think so, too (compare p. 39 of the WP 34S manual). I'm neither an owner nor a designer of that Chinese calculator, however.

d:-)

[From Hong Kong]

The rightmost digit of a decimal integer is better called ge4(­Ó) rather than yi4(¤@¡^. This digit position is called ge4 wei4(­Ó¦ì).

We call various digit positions as follows:

n ge4(­Ó)

n0 shi2(¤Q)

n00 bai3(¦Ê)

n,000 qian1(¤d)

n0,000 wan4(¸U)

n00,000 shi2 wan4(¤Q¸U)

n,000,000 bai3 wan4(¦Ê¸U)

n0,000,000 qian1 wan4(¤d¸U)

n00,000,000 yi4(»õ)

n,000,000,000 shi2 yi4(¤Q»õ)

Edited: 10 Dec 2012, 4:02 a.m. after one or more responses were posted

[Walter B]

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The rightmost digit of a decimal integer is better called ge4(­Ó) rather than yi4(¤@¡^. This digit position is called ge4 wei4(­Ó¦ì).

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Thanks for the information - I stay corrected :-) Alas, the characters you included are not displayed here properly (no idea what I can do to change that), so I have to guess: You are talking about ge4 like in yi4 ge4 ren2, aren't you?

d:-)

[From Hong Kong]

Those characters are Traditional Chinese characters. You could change the code to "Traditional Chinese (Big 5)" to view them. Traditional Chinese is commonly used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau whereas Simplified Chinese is used in Mainland China, Singapore and Malaysia.

Yes, the ge4 here is the ge4 in yi1 ge4 ren2(¤@­Ó¤H).

Edited: 10 Dec 2012, 1:37 a.m.

[Walter B]

(For our unilingual readers: Thanks!)

d:-)

[Tim Wessman]

Put a little angle symbol in front of the o, pi or g. That is what we will be doing...

TW

Edited: 3 Dec 2012, 10:22 a.m.

[Walter B]

Thanks for sharing. So it will look like <°, <pi, or <g d:-)

[Eric Smith]

I still think it should be 2pi, even with the angle symbol prefix.

And unless the angle symbol is very clearly an angle symbol, people will misinterpret the degrees annunciator as meaning that something is less than zero.

If I weren't going to use "DEG", "RAD", and "GRAD", I think I'd use <360, <2pi, and <400, respectively.

Edited: 4 Dec 2012, 6:12 p.m.

[Tim Wessman]

That is why you use the "measured angle" character. Hard to interpret that as anything but.

TW

[Raymond Del Tondo]

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If I weren't going to use "DEG", "RAD", and "GRAD", I think I'd use <360, <2pi, and <400, respectively.

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And this could even be optimized to a single numeric digit: Just use 3, 2 or 4 , respectively, since everybody will know the meaning of the digit in the reserved place (This wasn't to be taken too serious, but the discussion seemed to go somewhat abroad somehow;-)
More seriously, why not just use D,R and G ? This is what I use in SpeedUI, it's described in the doc, and it's near enough to the DEG,RAD, GRAD every user of HP scientific calcs from the LCD area (more than 32 years now) should be used to.

[Paul Dale]

Instead support internationalisation of messages and annunicators.

- Pauli

[Raymond Del Tondo]

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Instead support internationalisation of messages and annunicators.

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I'm not sure if I understood you correctly. D,R and G are international.

Example from the German Wikipedia about Radians:

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Taschenrechner und Computer

Wissenschaftliche Taschenrechner berechnen Winkelfunktionen wahlweise in Radiant oder in Grad, manchmal zusätzlich auch in Gon. Der Modus zur Berechnung in Radiant ist auf den meisten Taschenrechnern mit „RAD“ oder "R" gekennzeichnet.

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which nearly literally translates into: Scientific calculators calculate angle functions in either degrees or radians, sometimes they also offer gon. The mode for calculating in radians is indicated with "RAD" or "R" on most calculators.

After all it's simply a convention, as many things;-)

If you want to make everyone happy, just make it configurable (short,long,short_sym,long_sym,custom) .

Ray

[Paul Dale]

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If you want to make everyone happy, ...

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This will never be possible :-)

There will be compromises and limitations.

- Pauli

[Walter B]

... by simply taking over the international language of mathematics wherever possible.

d:-)

[Paul Dale]

Even that isn't always clear. LG vs LOG. ASIN vs SIN^-1 vs ARCSIN vs ARCSINE.....

- Pauli

[Walter B]

... wherever possible!

d:-)

[Raymond Del Tondo]

Maybe someone should start a poll about this...

[Eddie W. Shore]

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The first thing I have to do after resetting a calculator for any reason is switch to radians mode. Just out of curiosity, how many people here would be upset if the default angle mode was radians rather than degrees?

Or we could make the default angle mode grads, and annoy nearly everyone. :-)

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Radians is fine with me.