A Scientific Calculator for the MacOS Community
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A Scientific Calculator for the MacOS Community |
RPN Calculator is a scientific calculator for use on Macintoshes running MacOS 8.1 through MacOS 10.2. Having 2 years of development behind it, RPNC gives Macintosh users a solid alternative to the standard MacOS calculator application. RPNC uses more memory than most calculator apps; however, this memory is mostly dedicated mathematical functionality... not gimmicks. It is my hope that RPNC will save you trips to other applications, making the memory well used.
A companion application to RPN Calculator is available. It is called PolyRoot. As the name suggests, it finds the zeros of a real or complex polynomial.
RPNC has many useful features that may be of interest. In particular, it leverages the MacOS to provide an integrated calculating environment. Drag & Drop works almost everywhere in RPNC and PolyRoot, allowing for some very interesting stack operations, including calculations up in the stack via dragging stack elements directly to unary function buttons. Of course, inter-application number sharing is a snap. See the RPNC help for details... the usefulness of these concepts should be apparent to any experienced RPN user.
RPNC uses some of Victor Shoup's NTL, which is a C++ library that supports arbitrary precision floating point arithmetic. The NTL is used to enhance double precision addition / subtraction by using 32 digits and then rounding as appropriate. This eliminates some of the "noise" that occurs due to IEEE's implementation. For an example, try 1 - 0.9 - 0.1 on the standard MacOS calculator app... it does not return zero. Is that a big deal? Maybe... maybe not... you can decide.
The NTL provides real value support for the Gamma Function, Beta Function, Error Function and Complementary Error Function. Complex support for the Gamma Function and Beta Function is based on algorithms (especially GAMMALN) from Numerical Recipes, 2nd Edition.
The NTL is used to extend RPNC's dynamic range with certain operators, such as the factorial function. This extra dynamic range allows for numbers like 500! to be calculated (see picture below), but these cannot be used in any further calculations within RPNC, since the application uses double precision everywhere. There is no extended range complex number support, as this would take a large amount of coding while providing practically no value to the user.
REALbasic plugin access to the NTL is provided by Dr. Robert Delaney. Many thanks to both gents for making this code easily accessible!
RPNC is shareware. Price is $8 US, or $75 US for a site with 10 or more copies.
J. M.
Baker
4201 Fairmont Parkway #1604
Pasadena, TX 77504
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RPNC Downloads Here are the latest builds of RPN Calculator. RPNC should be fully functional and relatively free of glitches on MacOS 8.1 or later. The X version is a separate app with different interface attributes. Please use it if you are using MacOS X.
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RPN Calculator is a scientific calculator for the Macintosh that was written to provide Mac users with a solid RPN calculator application. Here are a few key features:
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RPNC has features not normally found in a calculator program, such as rational number approximation and prime searches.
Miscellaneous Functions Palette, Mac
OS X
RPNC has the potential to eliminate trips to other programs. For example, it has a built-in unit converter.
Unit Converter Palette, Mac OS
X
