AutoHotkey Community

[Chris]

[Laszlo]

Yes, the fix point conversion at store or at set command parameters makes the arithmetic practically fix point. If you don't know the range of the intermediate results (as at a complicated expressions), you may end up with inaccurate results.

[Decarlo110]

This set of scripts is, as Nemroth said, brilliant. Essential for computation until such time that dynamic expressions are built-in. The title is a bit odd though, since it isnt so simple to me.

[Laszlo]

Thanks for the compliments. Rubberduck's script is way too long for me to comprehend fully. It seems to work. Its main merit is educational: anyone interested in programming long arithmetic could find the necessary ideas there. I am sure it can be extended for handling other operators, too, but if you add expression parsing, functions, etc, it will go unmanageably large. We should use for that a structured, modular programming language.

I work often with long numbers, so for me speed is important. Therefore I wrote a script, which provides an interface from an editor or from MS Word to Pari/GP (an open source computer algebra system), which loads faster than the windows calculator and provides arbitrary precision at high speed. I thought there was no interest in the AHK forum for this kind of exotic stuff, but if there were, I could post the script. As you probably guessed, I try to keep the code size below 50 lines, otherwise most everybody would not bother to try to understand, and use it blindly just as a downloaded program.

Pari/GP is nice, but has some shortcomings. E.g. there is no hex I/O, or long random number generator. Therefore I compiled GMP, the Gnu Multi Precision arithmetic library to a Windows DLL, and wrote an AHK wrapper for most of its functions. It works, but the wrapper script is long. I haven't got the time to write (or modify/adapt/compile) an expression parser, so you have to write all operations as function calls, like gmp_add(x,1). One day I will finish it, but it might not be worth the effort. For longer calculations I run Mathematica. It takes minutes to start up, but then it is very nice. I can recommend it if you have three grands for SW.

[Futurepower(R)]

Laszlo, I wrote the comment below and then read the part of your comment about you making a GMP DLL for AutoHotkey. However, maybe it is of interest anyway:

Laszlo, this seems relevant to your comment about GMP:

GMP for Windows
http://www.cs.nyu.edu/exact/core/gmp/

But I don't see a precompiled DLL.

Another subject: In general, I find arithmetic in AutoHotkey mystifying.

I offered to help re-write this page:
http://www.autohotkey.com/docs/Variables.htm
which I think should provide more clear information about assignment operators.

I don't know when to use := and when to use =

I notice that == works to test equivalency.

[Laszlo]

In the mean time I found a better solution: calc. It is free, runs in Windows under GnuWin32. You can download the binaries from here. It has a nice expression parser, handles any number system (hex, octal, decimal...), fix or floating point operations with arbitrary precision, many transcendental functions, and it is lightning fast. If you do arithmetic with a million digits, GMP might be faster, otherwise, there is no noticeable difference.

If you want to use GMP in Windows the easiest is to install MinGW with the GNU C compiler and GNU make. The GMP make file under MinGW can create a dynamic library, which can be normally accessed from AHK using DllCalls. I did it the hard way: tweaked the Visual Studio setup, until it compiled GMP. It was a week work, and quite a stupid idea.

[PhiLho]

[Laszlo]

MPCalc looks like a nice little utility (it is hard to beat its size or speed), but the simplest solution (if you don't need infinite precision), is the Windows calculator (or the PowerToy calculator, etc.). It accepts input pasted from the Clipboard, understands brackets and operator precedence, logic operations, decimal, octal, hex and binary I/O, practically everything a normal user wants. It is fast and already installed in your PC.

[Laszlo]

Since the scripts were posted, regular expressions were introduced to AHK. They allow great simplifications and removing some restrictions. The script below evaluates an arithmetic expression contained in a string, without any external programs. Therefore, it can be compiled and run in machines, where AHK is not installed. It can handle the usual arithmetic operations: + - * / mod (as % or \) and power (as **), predefined constants (pi and e) and some AHK functions (abs, floor, sqrt). Terms can be grouped with parentheses (..).

[Labouche10]

I am blown away by the crazy logic that you guys have implemented in creating a dynamic evaluator. In the meantime I wrote a quick & dirty little program that seems to do the same thing but much easier and with alot less code. I need some help though filling in the last gap. This great little calculator is actually able to take advantage of all the mathematical wonderfulness in autohotkey including all the trig and powers etc etc. I added a little regexreplace function for pi also. This script writes a dynamic little script that uses the built in evaluation of autohotkey then writes the solution to another file which is read. Both temp files are then deleted. It is a shame that all the previous code was written. I'm sure it took a long time to write. The only problem I'm having at this point is getting the dynamically written script to execute on computers that do not have autohotkey installed. Hopefully one of you more experienced guys can help with that. Thanks in advance for the help!

Thanks
Labouche10

[Laszlo]

The main point of the thread was to run the calculator on machines w/o AHK. The last version is only 40 lines, and uses no temporary files. If you need a more complete solution, look here. It uses Lexikos’ low level AHK functions for dynamically execute AHK code. It also runs without temp files and on machines, where AHK is not installed.

If you use temp files, 10 lines are enough for a simple calculator.

Still, your version has a nice GUI, and menus. Well done!

[wep]

[HotKeyIt]

Many thanks for this wonderful function Laszo. It is very useful.

[Laszlo]

I am glad you found it useful. You could simplify the handling of unary + and – a little more. Give it a try! It is a good exercise...

[HotKeyIt]

I use it as a quick calculator in my script, works perfect.

It is exactly what I am been looking for, especially brackets "(2+2)*2" are very useful for more complex calculation.

Very good job!