Stacniac

Stacniac (Copyright © 2002 Nick Howes) is an RPN calculator program. You may download and use it for free (but donations are gratefully accepted - click on the button below). You may link to this page. Please don't redistribute Stacniac; please don't decompile it or modify it. The source code is available.

Also check out Engineer's Calculator for the Apple® iPhone™ and iPod touch®.

Stacniac is 'slightly odd' in that it doesn't have buttons: you enter numbers and then type in commands. Apparently, most people prefer algebraic calculators and like to click on buttons, so I don't think Stacniac will have wide appeal; however, I like RPN and prefer to run the calculator from the keyboard. Stacniac has a fairly large set of commands which are invoked by typing short (but hopefully obvious) words. Stacniac is programmable in a limited way. It also has engineering, hexadecimal and currency display formats - these are customizable (if you're brave) via patterns (described in this document - scroll down to the section on Patterns).

A manual is also available.

There may be bugs in the code that cause malfunctions.
Use this application at your own risk.

Mac OS X

Download a disk image stc.dmg.gz containing the application.
Unzip (usually automatic) and mount the disk image (usually automatic or double-click stc.dmg).
Drag the application to the folder of your choice.

Windows, Linux, Solaris, etc.

First ensure that you have a Java Runtime Environment (version 1.3 or later) installed on your machine.
Next, get the stc.jar file.
Double-click the JAR file to launch the application (or type java -jar stc.jar in a terminal or DOS window).

Known bugs

Under Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar, beeping doesn't work.

Version History

• 1.0 changed quit handling for Jaguar.
• 1b1 first beta release.
• 1d8 fixed bug where unary minus wasn't accepted for exponent entry. Changed show command to use InfoView.
• 1d7 added protection against stack overflow and excessive iteration/recursion.
• 1d6 added show command.
• 1d5 changed pop to drop, added eq, gt, lt commands, added literals, conditionals, and termination.
• 1d4 added programmability.
• 1d3 added root, sign commands, new icon, dmg.gz distribution.
• 1d2 commands added to allow setting of display patterns
• 1d1 first release

Source Code

For those of you interested in the source code, it is available here as a JAR file. Note that Stacniac was put together fairly quickly and the source is lacking in both comments and elegance. Also, the source files contain tabs every 4 spaces.

This code is copyright ©2002 by Nick Howes. You're welcome to look at it and learn from it, but please do not directly re-use it without permission.

Send comments, questions, suggestions, bug reports to stc@ghostwood.org