What is calctool?

Calctool is a desktop calculator. It has been designed to be used with either the mouse or the keyboard. It is visually similar to a lot of hand-held calculators. There are financial, logical and scientific modes. Similar operations are color coded. Some of the calculator keys have menu marks. This indicates that there is a menu associated with that key.

One of the most important things to remember about calctool is that calculations are performed from left to right, with no arithmetic precedence. If you need arithmetic precedence, then you should use parentheses.

Internal arithmetic is now done with multi-precision floating point numbers. Accuracy can be adjusted from zero to nine numeric places in fixed notation, but numbers can be displayed in engineering and scientific notation as well. The calculator reverts to scientific notation when the number is larger than the display would allow in fixed notation. The base of operation can be changed between binary, octal, decimal and hexadecimal. Numbers are initially displayed in fixed notation to two numeric places, in the decimal base.

There are ten memory registers. Numbers can be stored or retrieved in these locations, and arithmetic can be performed upon register contents.

The display windows contains the current numerical value plus the current base and trigonometric type. There are also indicators which show if the hyperbolic and inverse function switches are set, and which numerical mode is currently in operation. If an operation needing more than one numerical input is partially complete, the operation is also displayed in this window as a reminder.

See the calctool manual pages for more details on the various options available with this program.

There are two versions of this application available; one that uses the OpenWindows XView graphical toolkit (calctool), and one that uses the GNOME Gtk2 graphical toolkit (gcalctool).

This project is hosted at Sourceforge and you can go to the project pages to submit bugs, , etc.  Mailing lists are available for you to ask questions and to help keep you informed of the progress being made.

The latest calcool sources are available from CVS here and the latest gcalcool sources are available from CVS here.

Special thanks
To Professor Richard Brent for allowing his multiple precision arithmetic package to be used in this project. For more information on the original FORTRAN MP package see: http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/oucl/work/richard.brent/pub/pub043.html

Powered and
Hosted by