Percent sign doesn't do anything

[Former user]

Unlike in Excel, using "%" as a unary operator does nothing (it says "invalid expression"). For example, if I want to compute 30%120 it should output 36: (30%)120 = (301/100)120 = 0.3 * 120 = 36.

I'm pretty sure this used to work, and I use SpeedCrunch for speed, so am frustrated that I can't re-enable this. I saw some reference to changing the percent behavior to do something mathematically incorrect but possibly expected by less technical users, and I'm glad that wasn't changed, but how can I re-enable this shorthand? I'm not sure why allowing an option to re-enable the % as a unary operator is harmful.

For financial calculations, this is very useful as you can input basis points easily. For example, if I want "Thirty basis points of a 4 billion dollar bond", in Excel I can write: +30%%4,000,000,000. I used to be able to do the same in SpeedCrunch, but now I have to write: 30/100/1004,000,000,000.

Clearly not the end of the world, but it's materially slower this way if you do dozens of calculations per minute.

[Pol Welter]

As a workaround, have you considered defining p = 0.01? This would allow you to use the symbol p (or whatever you prefer to call it) as a unit, giving a behaviour that is reasonably close to the old percent operator.

[Helder Correia]

% operator removed in issue #583