Some of the best calculators in the world have an RPN (reverse polish notation) mode. This is a a command-line implementation of a RPN calculator.
- The calculator has a stack that can contain real numbers.
- The calculator waits for user input and expects to receive strings containing whitespace separated lists of numbers and operators.
- Numbers are pushed on to the stack. Operators operate on numbers that are on the stack.
- Available operators are +, -, *, /, sqrt, undo, clear.
- Operators pop their parameters off the stack, and push their results back onto the stack.
- The ‘clear’ operator removes all items from the stack.
- The ‘undo’ operator undoes the previous operation. “undo undo” will undo the previous two operations.
- sqrt performs a square root on the top item from the stack.
- The ‘+’, ‘-’, ‘*’, ‘/’ operators perform addition, subtraction, multiplication and division respectively on the top two items from the stack.
- After processing an input string, the calculator displays the current contents of the stack as a space-separated list.
- Numbers should be stored on the stack to at least 15 decimal places of precision, but displayed to 10 decimal places (or less if it causes no loss of precision).
- All numbers should be formatted as plain decimal strings (ie. no engineering formatting).
- If an operator cannot find a sufficient number of parameters on the stack, a warning is displayed: operator <operator> (position: <pos>): insufficient parameters
- After displaying the warning, all further processing of the string terminates and the current state of the stack is displayed.
5 2
stack: 5 2
2 sqrt
stack: 1.4142135623
clear 9 sqrt
stack: 3
5 2 -
stack: 3
3 -
stack: 0
clear
stack:
5 4 3 2
stack: 5 4 3 2
undo undo *
stack: 20
5 *
stack: 100
undo
stack: 20 5
7 12 2 /
stack: 7 6
*
stack: 42
4 /
stack: 10.5
1 2 3 4 5
stack: 1 2 3 4 5
*
stack: 1 2 3 20
clear 3 4 -
stack: - 1
1 2 3 4 5
stack: 1 2 3 4 5
* * * *
stack: 120
1 2 3 * 5 + * * 6 5
operator * (position: 15): insucient parameters
stack: 11
(the 6 and 5 were not pushed on to the stack due to the previous error)
Java JDK 8 and Maven are required to run the project.
As in any Maven project, it may be required to run:
mvn clean install
To run the command-line application:
java -jar target\rpn-calculator-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar
To see the history in the calculator output besides the stack, add program argument -h
java -jar target\rpn-calculator-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar -h
Use the keyword exit
to stop the application
- Sebastian D'Agostino