CE is Clear Entry. If you want to hit 2 x 4, but accidentally press 2 x 44, you can press the CE button before pressing = to clear the 44 but not the "2 x" part.
C will clear all of it so you can start over at the beginning.
Pressing CE twice may or may not clear entries in reverse order, depending on you calculator model.
And in my mind "CE" is "Clear everything". I'm keeping OP's method
doesn't everyone know it stands for Celery Endives?
Problem is on some calculators C is clear all and CE is clear entry, on some C is clear entry and AC is clear all, and some have a C/AC or CE/C button where it’s press once to clear entry and press twice to clear all.
So it’s safest to mash unless you really know your calculator, because the industry can’t get its shit together, and that’s the sole reason it died (I’m assuming.)
Thanks I was looking at the answer and thinking it didn't fit my memory. i'm sure most of mine were ACs. TBF with things like VPAM coming in the late 90s, you did have backspace and all sorts of stuff like that.
I still remember doing linear regression in a stats exam on i think a casio fx-115W something like that . Excellent calculator - but just no, it was time for some things to be on a real computer.
Should be replaced with a backspace icon and a trash can icon
You mean CE doesnt stand for "clear everything"? And here I thought more letters meant more clearing.
This person calculates.
And it all depends on the calculator. The one right next to me only has a CE button and it acts as a C button. So not even the people making them know what they do sometimes.
Shit. I thought it was clear and clear everything. I guess this is why I also push both buttons rapidly and make sure to just retype everything
It's solar powered so I just wait for night time to clear it then do the next problem in the morning
What are you, my local DMV?
I discovered that hitting something like C, CE and 0 simultaneously for some reason worked as an instant power off for my school calculator. Do calculators have such hidden off-buttons? Because I have discovered other calculators with other combinations.
There's actually a neat reason for this! The way that simple keys work, like those in a calculator, is by connecting a circuit and letting a small amount of voltage through. This is usually fine because the keypad is broken up into different rollover zones, which is how multi-key input works. But if you find and press keys that are all in the same zone, their voltages add up and can actually overwhelm the little cpu in there. Really old calculators were really easy to break because designers never thought users would need to press keys like division, multiplication, subtract, add, square and square root all at once, which as you can imagine, caused a massive power spike.
Now, is any of this true? I have no idea dude, you're calculator was probably fucking haunted or something. I'd have taken that thing to a seance with a ouija board immediately.
Calculators just have a bad user interface in general. It's pretty amazing that the UI was established in 1970 and was never changed after that.
ah yes, wait until you find out about the qwerty keyboard. Or better yet, the fucking ABCDE layout for some godforsaken reason.
Well, they've sold the same product for about the same price since 1970, so it makes sense. I have no idea how schools can require a specific device from a specific manufacturer. It's just straight up market control by a public entity.
Curious to know why ? Basic functionality seems very obvious and friendly to me.
If there is any nuance beyond a 4-function calculator with a single clear button, any nuance or deviation from any kind of standard will not be clearly explained.
There's never a backspace key, only two "clear" buttons that have nuance between them and little to no description as to which does what.
For one thing, just displaying the latest number isn't useful if you're doing anything complicated. For another, many calculations involve using the same number over again multiple times. Some calculators have a memory entry, but many don't. There's a "C/CE" but there isn't a backspace, so if you get one digit wrong, you have to start that entry over (and hope you chose the right option among C/CE/AC/CA/etc. If you accidentally hit the wrong operation key (multiply, divide, plus, minus) AFAIK there's no way to clear the operation. A lot of common math operations involves parenthesized expressions, but if you're using a basic calculator you have to instead enter things in an unnatural order. It's pretty common to end up in a situation where the calculator is displaying B and you want to do A/B but you can only easily do B/A. Fancy calculators have a 1/X button to fix this, but if not you're out of luck. Same with having B and wanting to do A-B but only being able to do B-A. You can fix that by multiplying by -1, but again, it's a UI issue that you can't just say "hold onto that number for a second because I want to enter another number and then use it".
But it has been changed a lot?
The most basic immediate execution four operation calculator might still look the same, but that's because it's a very simple thing and you can't really get much wrong. For scientific calculators the UI has changed lots. As have the requirements. It used to be a specialist tool used to do thousands of calculations daily. An expensive thing that had to earn its keep. RPN and stuff like that made sense for people who could easily get back weeks of training in just a few years of being slightly more efficient while working. Now we have the natural order delayed execution thing, because the calculators are mostly for students. Who need the UI to be as easy to grasp as possible, because they won't ever have to do enough calculations to benefit from a faster but harder UI. That doesn't mean any of those approaches to UI is better or worse. Some things require instructions and making everything idiot-proof shouldn't ever be the ultimate goal (check out modern computing for why!).
(check out modern computing for why!)
Because when you need to do a process a thousand times, you program it in an actual computer. Then you just have a specific interface for just your process that makes everything simple.
And the developer really only needs to understand the process for a couple months. Once it's confirmed working correctly, you're generally done with that piece of code.
Press both simultaneously, while twisting the joystick in a "C" motion, to launch a fireball.
That's ki, not fire. 🤓
There sure is a lot of overlap with people criticizing the technical interface of a calculator and nerds, wonder why that is? Oh well glad I’m not one of those nerds, now back to the clear button being so obtuse.
It's amazing how much better this game looks than a bunch of games that came out years after it.
Same energy as me holding Ctrl and pressing S seven times just to make sure.
I don't think anyone's ever been punished for saving twice. Right?
This is where people give me examples where people have been prove me wrong. Please I want to know the sadness of others sadness give give sadness. Give give now sadness give
On an editor that auto saved and where Ctrl+S doesn't do anything, yes been there done that.
Press Ctrl+M+R+S to <Make> <Really> <Sure>
The calculator on my phone has an "AC" button, further confusing the situation.
The AC button cools the air around you.
No, i used it immediately when i was arriving to an answer it heated me up
That's so you can run it off the mains.
I think AC stands for All Clear
Oh yeah, that's for calculating your armor class.
Clearly nobody here does any serious calculator based math
Let's be honest, if you are doing serious math, you'll have a graphing calculator to do way more stuff, and the controls are much more like a mini computer (with a backspace key, and being able to delete individual lines of history, or all of the history with menus)
Use R
neve!
Or uses a serious calculator.
I mostly use matlab
Ive been forced to use it a bit and it has so many weird quirks that are just messed up. Index start at 1. Sometimes u have to assign some function output to a variable before u can pass it as an argument to another function.
I far prefer to use python with numpy matlab and scipy
huhuhuhh, i do thaaat.
I actually did laugh out loud at this though.
They should have gone with Clear Line instead of Clear Entry, because CE could also be Clear Everything… which is what clear does.
SO true lmao
I always spam that ce button.
I just noticed I don't have a hardware calculator...
And the software one I remember about is translated.
I do it a bunch of times for the same reason I also CTRL+C a bunch of times when I need to copy on windows.
I mean that I get since it seems to ignore a single ctrl+c on windows regularly.
C = clear
CE = clear everything
Is that true though? We’ll never know. One of the great mysteries
Clear and Clear Entry.
The better option is to use an RPN calculator as Hewlett-Packard used to make. Then the back arrow button just eliminates one digit at a time.
That's how it works on the adding machine I use at work. That might not be universal, but if I input something wrong I press C and retype it, meanwhile if I need to reset it all I press CE.
So it's not just me who's wrong! Good good. See you in math hell
I am using and loving Solve by Pomegranate Apps. Multiple workspaces and advanced functions available a swipe away. It doesn't seem to be available anymore, and it looked like the company was hitting hard times when they dumped things like Trump quotes and other shit apps into the store. So, apprehensive to recommend because of weirdness but best calculator ever.
Edit: down arrows barely meant anything on Reddit and they mean literally nothing here. Fuck you and your annoying orange. Peace out, hugs and kisses.
NCalc+ is pretty good. I don't use it for anything complicated though.
My favorite was MathAlly. I still have it through some built-in android backwards compatibility emulator, but once it goes, it goes. They haven't been on the app store for years.
