Mathter

Intro

Description Features Requirements

Description

Mathter is a free cross-platform calculator. Unlike the average Windows calculator nowadays, it does not try to simulate a physical calculator by forcing you to press buttons with your mouse, it is operated by keyboard only. It doesn't look very fancy, but at some point I might stick a nice GUI on top of it. With buttons

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The name of the program comes from the way Igors, the servants from Überwald, pronounce Master (namely Marthter) in the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett. "You've got - bits of people stored on ice?" said Nanny, horrified. "Bits of strange people? Chopped up? I'm not taking another step!"
Now Igor looked horrified.
"Not thrangerth," he said. "Family."
"You chopped up your family?" Nanny backed away.
Igor waved his hands frantically.
"It's a tradithion!"
Terry Pratchett - Carpe Jugulum, p322-323

Features

What can Mathter do for you, you ask? Well, this is a list of its features, not including the obvious ones like helping you add 2 and 2 together:

ability to handle very large numbers (e.g. it can calculate 2**100000 if you give it a couple of seconds or minutes)
implicit ('natural') multiplication for parentheses ((5+1)(3-1)==12)
a lot of documentation (more than program code in fact )
built-in virtually infinite automatic results memory and history
abilities to manipulate all standard data types as well as high-level ones like lists
reasonably large number of built-in functions and constants, including functions for statistics/probability calculations, trigonometry, area, perimeter and volume calculation for different shapes
ability to use user-made plugins, define own constants and functions, etc.
session saving and restoring
facilities for file manipulation
free and open source (GPL)

Requirements

Mathter should work on any computer where Python can run. I have only tested it on Windows XP and on Mandrake 9.1, but as far as I know there is no OS-specific code in it so it should work on Windows 9x/ME/NT/XP as well as all Linux flavours, OS X and a whole lot of exotic systems.

If your operating system does not come with Python installed (Linux distro's usually do include Python, but Windows systems don't) or you have an old version like the ones delivered by RedHat in releases below 8.0, you can get a Python distribution for your operating system at Python.org. I think Mathter should work with any version starting with 2.2, but I have only tested it on 2.2.2.