A better financial calculator Students of the mathematics of finance seem to be comfortable using calculators to evaluate formulas or numerical expressions. They are typically much less comfortable writing programs in BASIC (or C or Java etc.) even in situations where the calculator solution is tedious and a short program would do the job efficiently. Spreadsheet models, with an emphasis on formulas as opposed to programs, are quite a reasonable and intuitive tool. But spreadsheet formulas seem to be about cells rather than money, time, and interest rates.The ideal tool would be a better calculator. APL and J can be used in calculator mode and therefore should be marketable to students as advanced calculators ideally suited to financial mathematics. This is especially true now that APL and J can be run on a variety of palm-sized computers.This paper presents a few ideas on how students might use J in the mathematics of finance. The emphasis is on using J as a calculator that has lots of memory and can store and compute with arrays. Therefore data will be entered and expressions evaluated but no programs will be presented in the classroom. (However, two utility programs and a few names for J primitives will be used as noted in the next subsection.) J Definitions used in what follows The J examples below are presented in the plain Courier font. Certain definitions are assumed and these are displayed in Courier italics. The definitions of these italicized functions are given in the Appendix at the end of the paper. In particular, frequent use is made of a dollar format function Df to display numbers in dollar currency format. When dates are part of the input data, the dayno function can be used to compute a day number.All examples in this paper (except for Example 7, which uses the sparse arrays of J version 4.04) can be done with versions of J going back (at least) to J FreeWare, version 3.02.
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Interest made simple with arrays
Brown, Richard L. W.
Follow ACM SIGAPL APL Quote Quad
, Volume 30 (4)
Association for Computing Machinery – Jun 1, 2000
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