NAME

fdc - a text-oriented, floating-point, infix desk calculator

SYNOPSIS

fdc

DESCRIPTION

fdc is a floating-point, text-oriented, infix calculator. It allows the use of variables and built-in functions. There are five basic operations: `+', `-', `*', `/' and `^'. Here, the symbol `^' stands for exponentiation. All the ANSI C single-argument floating-point math functions are built-in. These are sqrt, log, abs, fabs, sin, cos, tan, asin, acos, atan, sinh, cosh, tanh, ceil, and floor. e and pi are the two built-in constants. prec is a built-in variable whose special meaning is explained below.

Expressions are typed in C-language format. For example, to assign the log of 2/5 to the variable result, type:

result = log(2/5);

The calculator will type out the value of the expression. It assumes all constants are floating-point values and so it doesn't necessarily process the lines as a C-compiler would. For example, 2/5 yields 0.4 instead of 0 and C-compilers don't use the `^' operator for exponentiation (they use the math-library function pow()). Once a variable has been assigned a value, it is available for use on the right-hand side in succeeding expressions.

Results are only printed out when a semi-colon terminating the expression is received. The value of the built-in variable prec determines how many decimal places of accuracy are used to print out the result. Its default value is 6.

Calculator use is terminated by terminating the text stream being processed by the calculator. The manner in which this is done will depend on the operating environment and the source of the stream.

SEE ALSO

American National Standards Institute, American National Standard for Information Processing Systems -- Programming Language -- C (X3.159-1989).

COPYING

Copyright 1999-2006 Robert Burkhardt

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms Version 2 of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. You can also find a copy at the Free Software Foundation's website, http://www.gnu.org.

BUGS

None currently known. Please send any bug reports to R. Burkhardt, P.O. Box 426164, Cambridge, MA 02142-0021 or bobwb@juno.com.