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...