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Percentage oddity #53
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It's not really odd, it depends on how you interpret the input. Percent is just a fancy way of writing scaled factors. So 50% just means 0.5, 10% is 0.1, etc. But that's not the only way a calculator can interpret the percent sign. For convenience calculators support "adding/subtracting" percentages which are technically multiplications and divisions. Let's take for example Qcal:
this is also what happens in kalker with your calculation So neither Qalc nor kalker are "right" or "wrong" here, it's basically an edge case because percentages can be interpreted in two different ways and it's not always clear what the user meant (it's ambiguous). My tip: only do very basic stuff if you use the percentage operator. If you need to do advanced stuff be more explicit and don't use the percent sign in you calculations. |
Just leaving my thoughts - the approach of using a percentage suffix to write fractions is okay-ish, but having their value based on the preceding numeric value is such a strange approach. Of course it matches with the natural language description of these calculations, but the conversion to a proper computation of the value should be done by the users of this program, and not as an ambiguous (modulo or percentage operation?) implicit conversation step in this program, especially if you target a scientific audience. It feels out of place in this otherwise well designed program. |
I agree, percentage for me is just a shorthand for |
It's quite common for calculators to base the result on the preceding value (WolframAlpha does it too) and I use it quite a lot myself for quick calculations, to do things like |
Great, but it does not make sense. Qalc, for example, outputs 0 in this case.
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