I always leave it open now and it has saved me countless times. Really with the iOS version had this feature built in as well.
That is, if you type 1 + 2 / 2, the answer shows up as 2 and the paper tape shows
1 + 2 / 2
= 2
1 + 2 / 2
= 1.5
While the single-value-view of a calculator removes visual context, if you are banging out multi-step calculations as a power user not having the standard order of operations would be odd.
The workaround, as you say, is to just press enter (equals) after each required subtotal. This is pretty semantically clear, that is - if you consider a traditional keyboard to even be a thing that young people are familiar with - and that is getting arguable!
Key corollary issues to the single-value-view nature of computer calculators are that they pull a lot of (now obtuse) cultural context from physical calculators plus regular mathematical context, none of which is obvious to occasional computer calculator software users.
It's probably high time this stuff was rejigged. Thanks for the paper tape tip!
What I am arguing is that the visual display in the "Paper Tape" view is wrong because it displays different answers for the same values.
Now if only I could calculate the log of something by pressing 'log' that would be nice.
If to the right of the 4 basic operators +, -, ×, ÷ you have a vertical strip (greenish in my case), you can slide it to the left and have access to various other operators/functions, including log.
Being based on the old SGI calculator, you can also slide any result to the left to get as many digits after the decimal point as you like.
e.g. slide in the extra ops, press π, then start sliding the 3.1415… result.
However, seeing as the calculator allows writing expressions with multiple operations, just shoving everything on the screen into ‘log()’ would be unreasonable, as one might want to provide the exact place for the logarithm themselves—so I guess the app does the most reasonable thing it can.