Calculator

A scientific calculator is a type of electronic calculator, usually but not always handheld, designed to calculate problems in science, engineering, and mathematics. They have almost completely replaced slide rules in almost all traditional applications, and are widely used in both education and professional settings. In certain contexts such as higher education, scientific calculators have been superseded by graphing calculators, which offer a superset of scientific calculator functionality along with the ability to graph input data and write and store programs for the device. There is also some overlap with the financial calculator market. Functions Modern scientific calculators generally have many more features than a standard four or five-function calculator, and the feature set differs between manufacturers and models; however, the defining features of a scientific calculator include: scientific notation floating point arithmetic logarithmic functions, usin...

The fundamental difference between a calculator and computer is that a computer can be programmed in a way that allows the program to take different branches according to intermediate results, while calculators are pre-designed with specific functions (such as addition, multiplication, and logarithms) built in. The distinction is not clear-cut: some devices classed as programmable calculators have programming functions, sometimes with support for programming languages (such as RPL or TI-BASIC). Typically, the user buys the least costly model having a specific feature set, but does not care much about speed, since speed is constrained by how fast the user can press the buttons. Thus, designers of calculators work to minimize the number of logic elements on the chip, not the number of clock cycles needed to do a computation. For instance, instead of a hardware multiplier, a calculator might implement floating point mathematics with code in read-only memory (ROM), and compute trig...