Do you find yourself tapping in the value of Planck's constant (or some other number) into your calculator all the time?

Have you ever been near a PC and wanted to do a quick calculation, yet all that computing power was useless to you because there was no quick calculator program available?

Do you find that Mathematica loads too slowly to be useful for quick calculations, and that the Windows calculator program is pathetic?

If your answer is yes to the above questions, then contact me and I will send you a copy of AndyCalc. This is a program which is half way between Mathematica and the Windows calculator. It loads quickly (unlike Mathematica or MatLab) but supports a Lisp-like environment allowing you to define and use variables and combinations of varibales (unlike the Windows calculator).

For example, you can get results directly from the DOS prompt, by typing
C:\> calc 4 pi eps0 hbar c / eV^2
and AndyCalc responds with 137.036 (the fine structure constant).
Once you are inside the program, you can define and use variables, just like in Mathematica. AndyCalc can handle just about any calculation, in double precision arithmetic, ie 15 sig fig. The main thing it does not do is symbolic manipulation. Thus, if you type
x==(a^2 + a b)/a
then AndyCalc does not respond with a + b. However, if you tell it
a=4; b=6
and then ask for the value of x, AndyCalc replies with the correct answer, 10.

I wrote AndyCalc to help me in everyday experimental calculations, so that is the kind of thing it is useful for. It knows about the error function and the gamma function, as well as all the ordinary ones. It will do a Simpson's rule area calculation, and plot and tabulate. If you would like a copy, send me an email, specifying whether you want DOS or sun unix (Sparkstation) versions.