It allows you to type in math expressions, assign variables, define functions, convert units, add units together and. Ever.īut the purist says, "Someone may stumble."Īunt Loreen said, "Sometimes the 'You shoulds' are the sh-ts. CalcPad is a smart notepad that calculates answers based on what you type in. To force the use of the TAB-key, or the mouse to move through data-entry fields would simply guarantee that no one would use your program. Your eyes never left the drawing as you did this, and immediately upon completing that line item, your left hand picked up a yellow highlighter and highlighted that item - one of many hundreds or thousands that would be necessary in a materials take-off of any appreciable size. You didn't look at your right hand - you looked at your left hand index finger which was glued to (and rarely left) the large page at precisely the item you wanted to enter into your tabulation program, as you entered the SAC code, the qty per unit, the number of units, the bar size number, the bend category, the grade of steel, and the total length. You right hand rested on the keyboard's ten-key pad some 3-5 feet away. You sat at a wide desk or table with a set of plans 30" to 48"-wide spread out to your left (if you were lucky) and another 30"-48" of table was needed to catch the plan pages turned to reveal the one you were working on. So why was it important to do things this way, and break the conventions so dear to the heart of the standard's purist? Because this is how I (and many others) estimated rebar in the 1990's: I could TAB or ENTER-key my way through all fields, the up and down arrows performed the same tasks as the TAB-key, just like on a desktop program. I was inordinately proud of it, bird's nest of bad programming practice that it was. This is just a version of the "lest thou cause thy brother to stumble" club used to nudge the religious into compliance with strictures that make no sense to them (and yeah, the quote is probably not verbatim, but hopefully the gist of it is clear).Įxample: I (who am not a programmer) once wrote a tangled mess of HTML and JavaScript to accept, and tabulate data entry for rebar (reinforcing steel) estimates. Web standards purists will trot out a reference to some standard and point out the imagined (and terrifying) consequences of making the TAB or ENTER key behave just as they would in a non-web application, AKA a real data-entry program. It represents a flexible and modern programmable calculator with Html report generator. Couldn't agree more with the last two paragraphs. Calcpad is free software for mathematical and engineering calculations.
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