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The Cowlculator was designed with ease-of-use in mind. The home page includes a basic calculator that supports user-definable variables, a few common functions, and parenthesis which are useful for overriding natural operator precedence.
Using the Cowlculator is straight-forward -- simply enter your calculation in the "formula" field on the home page, and the answer will automatically appear immediately below. If the answer shows "?Syntax error" don't worry, it just means that there may be a problem with your calculation (e.g., invalid characters, extra operators, unbalanced sets of parentheses, dividing by zero, etc.) or that an attempt was made to solve your formula before you finished entering it.
Here are some examples of simple formulae (that all happen to yield the number 42 as their answer), which are pretty straight-forward:
Here's a formula (which also yields the number 42 as its answer) that uses two functions; the floor() function returns the greatest integer (it basically removes the fractional portion from a number) of pi multiplied by the constant 13.38 (the second example demonstrates how to define and use a variable):
You can use more than one variable (end each definition with a semi-colon). Here are a few examples that define variables (each is terminated by a semi-colon), and then use them in fairly simple calculations:
Operators
| Operation | Description | |
| + | addition | |
| - | subtraction | |
| * | multiplication | |
| ^ | ** | exponent, raise to the power of |
| / | divide | |
| = | assignment [of variables] | |
| ; | delimiter | |
Functions
| Trigonometry | Description | |
| sin(n) | calculate sine of n | |
| cos(n) | calcaulte cosine of n | |
| tan(n) | calculate tangent of n | |
| asin(n) | calculate inverse sine of n | |
| acos(n) | calcaulte inverse cosine of n | |
| atan(n) | calculate inverse tangent of n | |
| sinh(n) | calculate hyperbolic sine of n | |
| cosh(n) | calcaulte hyperbolic cosine of n | |
| Logarithmic | Description | |
| log(n) | compute natural logarithm of n | |
| log2(n) | compute base-2 logarithm of n | |
| log10(n) | compute base-10 logarithm of n | |
| Other functions | Description | |
| abs(n) | returns absolute (non-negative) value of n | |
| sqrt(n) | calcualtes square root of (n) | |
| pi() | returns constant of pi (approximately 3.14159265358979) | |
| exp(n) | computes Euler's constant (approximately 2.71828182845905) to the power of n | |
| ceil(n) | returns lesser integer of n | |
| floor(n) | returns greater integer of n | |
| frac(n) | returns fractional portion of n | |
| rand(n) | returns pseudo-random fractional number where n is 0, or a pseudo-random whole number where n is greater than 0 | |
| srand(n) | sets the seed for the psueudo-random number generator (if not set, the default seed is 0) | |
| theta(n) | documentation not available | |
Back to work
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