From: Josef 'Jupp' Schugt <jupp@...>
Date: 2003-09-06T06:09:50+09:00
Subject: [ANN] rcalc 2.0 (Ruby Calculator)

Saluton!

I am proud to announce version 2.0 of Ruby Calculator (rcalc for
short). Ruby calculator is a scientific RPN (Reverse Polish Notation)
calculator based on the extmath library. At present it only provides
a commandline interface but that may change in the future. Supported
functions are:

  !, !=, #, *, **, +, -, ., /, <, <=, ==, >, >=, ?, ^, abs, acos,
  acosh, acot, acoth, acsc, acsch, add, and, asec, asech, asin,
  asinh, atan, atan2, atanh, beta, c, ceil, cos, cosh, cot, coth,
  csc, csch, delta, div, drop, dup, e, epsilon, eq, eqv, erf, erfc,
  exp, exp10, exp2, f, factorial, false, floor, frexp, gcd, ge, gt,
  hypot, in, inv, lcm, ld, ldexp, le, lg, lgamma, linsolve, ln, log,
  log10, log2, lt, mul, nand, ne, neqv, nor, not, or, over, p, pi,
  pow, puts, read, rnd, root, rot, round, sec, sech, sign, sin, sinc,
  sinh, sqr, sqrt, sqsolve, sub, swap, t, tan, tanh, tgamma, to_f,
  to_i, to_s, true, x, xor

You want to input mass in kg and speed in m/s and need kinetic energy
in J? That's a one-liner:

  rcalc 'mass [kg]?' in 0.5 x 'speed [m/s]?' in sqr x 'E_kin [J]' p

The interaction looks like this:

mass [kg]?
7
speed [m/s]?
3
E_kin [J]
31.5

Wonder why 'x' is used for multiplication? This is because of Unix
shells that interpret '*' as all files and subdirectories in the
current directory and '.' as the present directory. On systems that
don't do that (or if you escape these characters) they also result in
multiplication and so does 'mul'.

rcalc is self-documenting which means that you can ask for help on
specific functions. If alternative names of a function are supported
they are listed - try 'rcalc --help' or 'rcalc -h' for details.

rcalc's homepage is at

    http://rcalc.rubyforge.org/

Note that rcalc requires extmath. extmath's homepage is at

    http://extmath.rubyforge.org/

Presently only radian is supported but support for degree and gon is
the next issue I will address.

Gis,

Josef 'Jupp' Schugt