MathCAD Prime 7.0 is where my company is still stuck at, but it still has the very frustrating limitation/bug of not accepting decimal numbers without putting a leading zero before the decimal. It allows you to do this when calculating a number, but not when using units. Has this been fixed in subsequent versions?
It is frustrating not only from the standpoint that I never put leading zeros before a decimal, and never have, never do on any other program/software, and it's not a problem at any other time on any other software package I use (including MathCAD Prime 7.0) UNTIL I try to use units in the calculation. I have hundreds of worksheets where I have not used leading zeros and it used to calculate everything just fine, even with the use of units.
I can confirm that this behaviour has not changed in Prime 10.
As a workaround you may type an explicit multiplication (*) between the number and the unit as suggested by Luc or (for consistency) an implicit one which you get by pressing ctrl-shift-U.
BTW, Prime calls this implicit multiplication the "scaling operator".
@Werner_E wrote:
BTW, Prime calls this implicit multiplication the "scaling operator".
I've occasionally wondered why PTC called it the "scaling operator" or, to be more precise, why they gave it the functionality they did.
AFAICT, the "S-expression" associated with each maths region doesn't so much affect the nature of the calculation but rather the chosen display form. Certainly, the scaling operator scales scalars, but its prime(!) purpose seems to be to tell Mathcad not to draw a multiplication operator between terms that Mathcad is actually multiplying.
The Hadamard (element-by-element or vectorized) product would, IMO, have been a more mnemonic operation on arrays.
Stuart
The reason you can't type ".2in" is because the dot is a valid leading character in an identifier name.
When the number begins with 0, Mathcad Prime recognises a non-numerical character as the number string terminator (unless that character is an i or a j, in which case Mathcad interprets the number as imaginary).
Stuart
From the Mathcad Prime 10 Help:
Variable and Function Names
Variable names, function names, unit names, constant names, etc, are generically referred to as identifiers.
Identifiers can contain any valid Unicode character from the Base Multilingual Plane (BMP) with the exception of white space and control characters, and with the additional limitation that the first character cannot be a decimal digit (0-9). Unicode BMP characters are defined as having a code in the range 0-65535.
The label associated with an identifier is considered part of its name when distinguishing it from another identifier. This makes it possible to define a new function mean with the Variable label, and still be able to refer to the built-in function mean by specifying the Function label. However, if you define a new function mean with the Function label, you will be hiding the built-in definition of that function.
Identifiers are case-sensitive, can be of any length, and may contain any combination of valid characters:
•Letters—Uppercase and lowercase letters.
•Digits—0 through 9, but not as the first character of a name. PTC Mathcad interprets leading digits in combination with letters as either an imaginary number (2i or 3j) or as a number times a variable (3x).
•Dot—A single, punctuation character, period can be used any where; including as the first character.
Yes, my problem is with the past ~30 years of using MathCAD, Excel, Origin, SolidWorks, AutoCAD, etc. is that none of these software applications widely used for Engineering calculations require a leading zero before a decimal point for numbers less than 1, some software changes the number upon entering it (hitting the enter key) to add a leading zero automatically, likely in line with the mentioned ISO standard. But through MathCAD v15 I was still not using leading zeros with all of my units calculations (nearly 100% of my worksheets) and it had no problem doing so.
In fact, my old worksheets from v15 and earlier MathCAD versions show an explicit "multiplication sign" between the .XXX number less than zero and the units typed. Below was the old version of MathCAD accepting a typed ".118" immediately followed by "in" and hitting the Enter key. MathCAD in these older versions of v15 and prior wasn't even changing the number to add the leading zero, back then.
All of my MathCAD v15 and earlier versions of MathCAD accepted the lack of a leading zero but still accepted the typed units (in) directly entered after the number with no other digit gymnastics or additional operators required. MathCAD used to accept this method of numerical input along with the immediate units system for ~30+ years which creates a frustrating exception for only MathCAD Prime, and only when I am using units in the equations.
I would only see it as a very minor annoyance, but if it bothers you so much that you sometimes have to explicitly insert a multiplication sign or a scaling operator, you can submit a product idea to PTC.
Mathcad 15 accepts the input .118in and interprets it correctly. Normally you would not see a dot
but in MC15 thats configurable (right click menu).
However, MC15 does not allow variable names that begin with a dot, as the dot is the subscript character, which was unfortunately changed to “ctrl -” in Prime in an unnecessarily complicated way. Prime also allows variable names to return from the subscript to the normal state
which is not possible with MC15.
You can never have everything 😞
