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Windows Calculator: A simple yet powerful calculator that ships with Windows
MIT License
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Programmer Calculator - Please add a feature to convert 8 bit words to their respective ASCII characters #1581

Open natewg60101 opened 3 years ago

natewg60101 commented 3 years ago

Problem Statement

I am currently debugging UART communication with an oscilloscope and as of now I have to read the binary bits, convert to hex with the calculator, then look in a table for ASCII characters. Evidence or User Insights

As of now the calculator only deals with raw numbers and data formulations. Adding this feature would connect the calculator more to the real world applications. I am an Electrical Engineer.

Proposal

This makes the calculator more functional and reduces the need for a table of ascii characters.

Goals

It would be nice if there was a keyboard that included the entire table, and you could type in ascii and see the binary, hex, etc.

Non-Goals

Performing math with ascii characters would be nice, but not necessary.

Low-Fidelity Concept

Have a condensed ascii character keyboard that contains only letters and numbers, with an option to expand it to the full table. If this is too much room, then simply have an option to type the character or pull one from an expandable list that is in a separate window. It wouldn't make sense to include by default the ascii character option in along with binary, decimal, hex, and octal, because ascii characters are not a number base. Perhaps add a checkbox to enable or disable this format (show or not show it along with all the other number types)

Requested Assignment

I'm just suggesting this idea. I don't want to implement it.

MicrosoftIssueBot commented 3 years ago

This is your friendly Microsoft Issue Bot. I've seen this issue come in and have gone to tell a human about it.

ghost commented 3 years ago

This pitch looks like it has everything it needs for review. In the meantime, we'll keep this idea open for discussion so the community has the chance to provide feedback. Check out our New Feedback Process for more info on the user-centered process we follow for new feature development.

magol commented 1 year ago

I had intended to create a similar issue, but saw that this one already existed. Being able to convert from/to ASCII would have helped a lot in some development situations.

ASCII is sufficient for most cases and is enough in a first version, but there are also many other character tables. It should be possible to be able to choose the character table. Also able to choose different versions of Unicode.

In a further development, it would have been smooth if you could provide a longer text or hex string to convert.