Awhile back I was doing some Octal (Base 8) math while writing a program to create a waveform output from a PC. In the process, I discovered that the included calculator program with Microsoft windows only does fractional calculations properly with decimal numbers and can’t do octal or hexadecimal fractions. See for yourself, pull up the calculator in Windows, set it to octal, and try dividing 5 by 6 and the answer you get is 0, which just ain’t right. Am I missing something ? Shouldn’t fractions other than base 10 work ?
Come on now, this is Microsoft we’re talking about. There are probably some shareware calculators out there that do alternate bases correctly.
On the other hand it may be easier to simply do your math in base 10 and convert the answer to base 8 later.
Yeah, the simple answer is you can’t. Windows Calculator only does octal, binary, and hexadecimal integer math - decimal is the only base that supports floating point operations. From the Calculator help file: “When you convert a decimal number that contains decimal places to another number system, the number is shortened to an integer.” I believe that it would require a non-negligible amount of overhead to do non-decimal operations in anything but integers.
Just accept that there are some things you can’t do on this calculator. There’s no button for the Gamma function, either.
Here’s a thought, though. If you know how to work with fixed-point numbers, you may be able to use it for that.
http://www.calculator.org/download.html
This well regarded freeware scientific also gives 0 for 5/6 in octal.
So it isn’t a Microsoft conspiracy. So what? Aren’t there any calculators that do non-decimal fractions?