A Cross-Platform Programmer's Calculator
– Independent Work Report Fall, 2015 – A Cross-Platform Programmer’s Calculator Brian Rosenfeld Advisor: Robert Dondero Abstract This paper details the development of the first cross-platform programmer’s calculator. As users of programmer’s calculators, we wanted to address limitations of existing, platform-specific options in order to make a new, better calculator for us and others. And rather than develop for only one- platform, we wanted to make an application that could run on multiple ones, maximizing its reach and utility. From the start, we emphasized software-engineering and human-computer-interaction best practices, prioritizing portability, robustness, and usability. In this paper, we explain the decision to build a Google Chrome Application and illustrate how using the developer-preview Chrome Apps for Mobile Toolchain enabled us to build an application that could also run as native iOS and Android applications [18]. We discuss how we achieved support of signed and unsigned 8, 16, 32, and 64-bit integral types in JavaScript, a language with only one numerical type [15], and we demonstrate how we adapted the user interface for different devices. Lastly, we describe our usability testing and explain how we addressed learnability concerns in a second version. The end result is a user-friendly and versatile calculator that offers value to programmers, students, and educators alike. 1. Introduction This project originated from a conversation with Dr. Dondero in which I expressed an interest in software engineering, and he mentioned a need for a good programmer’s calculator. Dr. Dondero uses a programmer’s calculator while teaching Introduction to Programming Systems at Princeton (COS 217), and he had found that the pre-installed Mac OS X calculator did not handle all of his use cases.
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