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 Originally Posted by Nurgling
This sounds like something built for accountants and not mathematicians or engineers.
Most consumer-class handheld calculators are programmed to do "percent add-on" and "percent discount" functions when the keys are entered as described by the OP, i.e. 100 + 5 % returns 105. This is intended to facilitate extremely common commercial calculations such as sales tax add-on and quick percent discount calculations, with user input that is highly intuitive for many people. More advanced math/scientific calculators follow a strict "order of operations" approach and return 1.05 with identical key entries. These are just two different conventions on how the % key can function. There is no universal right or wrong.
I think it is odd that Palm chose the less consumer-oriented approach since I would think that the Pre calculator would be used most frequently in exactly those kind of quick commercial applications, where people will expect the same behavior as a common handheld calculator.
I agree with a previous poster that the best approach is to avoid the % key altogether and enter: 100 * 1.05, if you want to add 5% to 100.
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