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Comment by whartung | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone found a more elegant treatment of calculating with units than the HP calculators?

I'd love to have an HP48 CLI to do unit calcs with.

  .5 * 10_m/s^2 * (15_s)^2 = 1125_m

Admittedly, the HPs interim results are a bit of a mess:

  sqrt(6.673E-11_N*m^2/kg^2 * 5.98E24_kg / 6780_km) =
    242603.08_N^.5*m/(kg^.5*km^.5)

But, this converts cleanly to m/s: 7671.8m/s

Everything else I've found have been just super fiddly.

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gnu units can do that

  You have: .5 * (10 m/s^2) * (15 s)^2
  You want: 
          Definition: 1125 m
  You have: sqrt((6.673E-11 N*m^2/kg^2) * (5.98E24 kg) / (6780 km))
  You want: 
          Definition: 7671.783 m / s

TI's graphing calculators work essentially the same way. As does GNU Units.

Give https://numpad.io/ a try. It's not a CLI though.

This is very nice, thanks!

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