Since my last blog post, I haven’t had another meeting with my mentor due to a delay, but I made good progress on my calculator.

Calculator update

I am proud to say that I have finished the new version of the calculator. This will probably also be the last version and unless there is anything else I need to do with it, the calculator is pretty much done. Once again, I encourage you to try it out!

Calculator download

The first thing you’ll probably notice is that there’s a whole bunch of new buttons! There are now 30+ buttons and the calculator has most of the functionality of a basic calculator, and even a bit more.

Secondly, you may notice a very slight speed increase, especially if you are inputting a very long expression. For anything small, you won’t be able to notice a huge difference, as the improvement was with the scaling (explanation in previous blog post).

The calculator uses some nifty tricks that my mentor taught me, such as short-circuiting an if statement or how recursion prioritizes the variables at the top of the stack (the variables that are in the current layer of recursion).

How to have a beautiful mind

Since I wasn’t able to have another meeting with my mentor since the last post, here’s a snippet from my most recent meeting.

 

C: “Is there a more efficient way to do all the buttons? This is so long”

S: “That’s what I was thinking. You have to instantiate all the buttons on their own and add actions to them. And you’ve already generalized one of the common actions into a function, so that’s good.”

C: “I think there’s more common actions, though. Like, other than instantiating it.”

S: “The only thing I can think about is generalizing more common actions into functions. That’s it.”

 

Thanks for reading! Make sure to check out my calculator!