- Source: WRPN Calculator
WRPN (or Windows Reverse Polish Notation) is an open-source scientific software calculator, simulating the Hewlett-Packard Voyager series' HP-16C "Computer Scientist" programmable calculator.
History
On April 3, 1995, Emmet P. Gray, an American programmer, at the time civilian employee at the US Army, now adjunct professor at the Texas A&M University, released WRPN 1.0 (16-bit), a public domain open-source software written in Borland C++ 4.0 for early verions of Microsoft Windows.
As of September 2024 the project is still in active development, and the latest WRPN 7.1.1 was released on August 26, 2024, for modern operating systems with Java installed, and as a mobile application for Android. Source code is available in C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET and Java.
Features
WRPN simulates almost all of the functions of HP-16C:
RPN (Reverse Polish notation) input support
Floating point, Decimal, Hexadecimal, Octal and Binary modes
Word sizes from 1–64 bits per word
Signed math
Logical operators
Bitwise operators
32 storage registers
4 position stack
203 lines of program memory
JRPN
In 2019 Bill Foote, an American software engineer and ex-Lead of the Sun Microsystems' standardization of interactive technologies for Blu-ray and other TV platforms, created the JRPN (JOVIAL Reverse Polish Notation Calculators), an open-source HP-16C simulator, forked from WRPN 6.0.2 in Java, but with all of the text set to be rendered from vector fonts (instead of the bitmap font used in WRPN), and licensed it under the free Apache License.
I always wanted a 16C, but I never really needed it, and I was a starving student at the time :-) WRPN works great on Android, but the UI uses images that were created back when screen resolutions weren't so high, so I dropped Emmet a line, and re-did some of the UI and published that as what I'm now calling "Legacy JRPN".
During the COVID-19 pandemic Foote fully rewrote JRPN code in Flutter and licensed it under GPLv3. JRPN is available now in two variants, 15C and 16C (simulating HP-15C and HP-16C accordingly), for Android, Linux, Mac OS, Windows and as a web application.
Also there is another RPN calculator of the same name, developed by William Giel as freeware proprietary software. It has been last released in 1999.
Gallery
See also
Comparison of software calculators
External links
WRPN Users Guide
WRPN 16c on Google Play
JRPN 16c Android package at the F-Droid repository
RPN/RPL Implementations
