pRPN Files

      pRPN, a portable RPN calculator inspired by HP.
      ===============================================

$LastChangedDate: 2012-05-07 09:12:09 +0200 (lun. 07 mai 2012) $

Contents:

      I. WHAT IS PRPN?
     II. WHY PRPN?
    III. LICENCE
     IV. COMPILATION AND INSTALLATION



I.    WHAT IS PRPN?

It is an RPN calculator based on wxWidgets for the GUI, that provides the
following objects: Reals, Complex, Vectors, Matrices, Binaries, Lists,
Expressions, Strings and Programs.
Expressions are minimalistic right now, they are not usable as such. On the
other hand, programs are almost fully implemented.
pRPN also provides a terminal interface if launched with -c option (see the
note in section IV about Windows version.)



II.   WHY PRPN?

I like to use my genuine HP-28S, and I didn't find any program close to the
power it brings with a similar simple interface. pRPN provides it.
At the moment the engine manages all HP objects except expressions. The
graphical interface is complete with different skins applicable.



III.  LICENCE

See COPYING file that comes along with the package the program belongs to.



IV.   COMPILATION AND INSTALLATION

The file of name INSTALL, distributed with pRPN source files, gives
instructions to compile and install the program, using the usual
    ./configure, make and sudo make install sequence.
This INSTALL file is the one provided by default by autotools.
Below is found information specific to this package.

- Linux compilation

    The configure script provides the following options in addition to the
    defaults.
    --disable-gui
        Compile without wxWidgets GUI => build a console-only executable
    --enable-debug
        Activate pRPN debug information (has nothing to do with wxWidgets debug
        system)
    --disable-nls
        Deactivate internationalization,
    --enable-maintainer-mode
        This option causes documentation to be rebuilt if necessary

    Note
      Bakefile files (.bkl extension) are used for Windows. Under Linux, the
      standard automake/autoconf couple is used, without any bakefile piece.
      Bakefile provides a half-a-way solution to get mixed with autotools
      (bakefilize, that replaces automake but keep using autoconf), that isn't
      in use here.
      Using bakefile generated makefiles under Linux is presumed to work fine
      but has not been tested for a while.

- Windows compilation

    Use the script gen-win-makefiles.cmd to rebuild makefile.gcc (Mingw
    compiler) and makefile.vc (Microsoft Visual C++) files.
    The script depends on where Gnuwin32 libintl files (includes & libs) are,
    and also Wx library.
    Rebuilding is done by bakefile, see point 3 below.

    1) Mingw
        Mingw32 works fine.
        Remind: to compile pRPN with Mingw, you've got to compile wxWidgets
        with it as well, executing:
          cd %WXWIN%\build\msw
          %MINGW32_BIN%\mingw32-make -f makefile.gcc

        Mingw is used to compile the packaged, final, binary (included in
        Windows installer.) It uses the options BUILD=release WX_DEBUG=0 to
        optimize the code.

        Mingw32 is licensed under GPL mostly, its homepage is found here
          http://www.mingw.org

    2) Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Express
        Compiles well. To first compile wxWidgets with msvc, you've got to
        open a msvc custom shell window (similar to cmd.exe window but tuned
        to match msvc command-line tools requirements), and execute
          cd %WXWIN%\build\msw
          %MINGW32_BIN%\nmake -f makefile.vc

        * IMPORTANT *
        msvc does not compile prpn when debug is on.

        Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Express can be downloaded for free, from
          http://msdn.microsoft.com/fr-fr/express/aa975050.aspx

    3) Makefiles generation
        As Windows doesn't provide the usual configure/make/make install
        mechanism (provided you are not using an environment like cygwin), the
        solution used is wxWidgets default, bakefile. You can find it from
          http://www.bakefile.org
        The batch file
          gen-win-makefiles.cmd
        automates msvc and mingw makefiles generation. Before running it you
        have to check where libintl is (headers & libs) and update the batch
        accordingly, and the same for Wx library.

    4) Note about Borland C++
        At first prpn used to be compiled using Borland C++ 5.5. It worked
        well but over time was found to have limitations:
          - Libintl does not compile with bcc => needed to deactivate it
          - With debug options activated on Wx library, a bug caused the
            linker to fail while creating the executable => needed to avoid
            using debug
          - Macros don't manage '...' argument (variable number of arguments)

        Now, the program does not compile with bcc any longer.

        Borland C++ 5.5 can be downloaded for free, from
          http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/20633

    5) Note about the console version
        Under Windows, by default, wxWidgets disconnects itself from the
        controlling terminal, making it impossible to interact with the
        console. Therefore the '-c' option with prpn is useless, you must
        execute prpnc.

        Under Linux both 'prpn -c' and prpnc work fine, but still, prpnc has
        an advantage.
        When providing the -c option under Linux, prpn initializes Gtk any way
        and fails to start if Gtk initialization fails. In particular,
        executing the following
          DISPLAY="" prpn -c
        won't work.
        prpnc works fine even if no graphical resource at all is available on
        the terminal.