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hunter

(38,263 posts)
1. Peng Robinson alpha functions are not my idea of recreation...
Sat Jun 4, 2016, 05:31 PM
Jun 2016

... but to put it in layman's terms (or at least any layman with a high school physics level of education...) is it fair to say these are an elaboration of the familiar gas equation pV=nRT useful when materials stop behaving ideally?

The ideal gas law is something every high school student ought to know... sigh.

I've played a little with Mathematica on my Raspberry Pi 2. It's free. It's slow. (It ought to be not-so-slow on the new Pi 3.)

http://www.wolfram.com/raspberry-pi

If anyone wants to learn programming these days then Javascript and HTML5 are the way to go. I offered my kids the same advice when they were in high school, even before Google won the browser wars and Adobe Flash was deprecated, but my children decided to be English majors, not computer programmers or scientists. Even so, I'll bet they recognize the ideal gas equation.

My first college computer programming class was Fortran. We wrote our programs on graph paper or special programming forms, then we punched our cards, put a rubber band around them, and left them in the box for processing overnight.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keypunch

In the morning we'd fix the single mistake that had halted the compiler (or more embarrassingly, fix whatever was wrong with our JCL cards) and try again.

If I wanted to I could still write programs in Fortran and convert them almost magically to Javascript using tools such as Emscripten. Images of my old MSDOS machines run perfectly well on emulators that are written entirely in Javascript and run on ARM architectures. That amuses me. I've got programs I wrote in Turbo-Pascal and 8086 assembly that run faster on my cheap Chromebook than they ever did on the original machines.

Yep, life is wonderful.

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