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"Intuitive Interactions"


John McCulloch's RPN Calculator Page

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RPN Calculators

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RPN or "Reverse Polish Notation" is a more natural way of performing calculations than the more conventional "=" sign calculators. The general principle of use is to type in a number, click "ENTER", type in another number and then click on the two-number operation you want to perform. Unfortunately, very few calculators use this method. My first RPN calculator was an HP 45 purchased by the company I worked for in the early 1970's - it cost over £400 - at that time you could get a reasonable second-hand car for that. Like many people, I much prefer to use RPN, and so I have built my own RPN calculator to use on my PC.

This is written in Visual Basic and runs on most 32 bit Windows platforms. It incorporates a number of features that I like to have:
  • Undo and Redo, for easy recovery if you make a mistake;
  • Cartesian to Polar number conversion, (and vice-versa);
  • All the computation stack registers are visible so that you know what numbers you are working with;
  • Alterable number base (including fractional number bases), (2.0 to 32.0) - try doing circular geometry calculations to the base Pi;
  • You can adjust the number of significant figures displayed;
  • 5 predefined number display formats: "Engineer" where the exponent is always a multiple of 3, "Money" where there are always two digits after the point; "Integer" obvious; "Exponent" also obvious; and "Free" which uses the decimal format where possible and the exponent form otherwise.
  • Hyperbolic functions;
  • Cut and paste so that you can transfer numbers between the calculator and other applications.

If you want to try this calculator, email me at

All I ask is five pounds, dollars or euros via PayPal and I will send you the download, (1.3 Mb). I welcome your feedback.




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This page last updated on 2023-03-01 JGM