Frink is a practical calculating tool and programming language designed to help us all to better understand the world around us, to help us get calculations right without getting bogged down in the mechanics, and to make a tool that's really useful in the real world.

Perhaps you'll get the best idea of what Frink can do if you skip down to the Sample Calculations further on this document. Come back up to the top when you're done.

Frink language was named after one of my personal heroes, and great scientists of our time, the brilliant Professor John Frink.

Here are some key features of "The Frink Language":

· Tracks units of measure (feet, meters, tons, dollars, watts, etc.) through all calculations and allows you to add, subtract, multiply, and divide them effortlessly, and makes sure the answer comes out correct, even if you mix units like gallons and liters.
· Arbitrary-precision math, including huge integers and floating-point numbers, rational numbers (that is, fractions like 1/3 are kept without loss of precision,) and complex numbers.
· Advanced mathematical functions including trigonometric functions (even for complex numbers,) factoring and primality testing, and base conversions.
· Unit Conversion between thousands of unit types with a huge built-in data file.
· Date/time math (add offsets to dates, find out intervals between times,) timezone conversions, and user-modifiable date formats.
· Translates between several human languages, including English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Korean, Japanese, Russian, Chinese, Swedish, and Arabic.
· Calculates historical buying power of the U.S. dollar and British pound.
· Calculates exchange rates between most of the world's currencies.
· Powerful Perl-like regular expression capabilities and text processing.
· Supports Unicode throughout, allowing processing of almost all of the world's languages.
· Reads HTTP and FTP-based URLs as easily as reading local files, allowing fetching of live web-based data.
· Runs on most major operating systems (anything with Java 1.1 or later,) as an applet, through a web-based interface, on a wireless Palm VII, on an HDML- or WML-based webphone, and on many mobile phones and hand-held devices.
· Installs itself on your system in seconds using Java Web Start and automatically keeps itself updated when new versions of Frink are released.
· Runs with a Graphical User Interface (both Swing and AWT) or a command-line interface.
· User interface has a Programming Mode which allows you to write, edit, save, and run extremely powerful programs even on a handheld device.
· Powers Frink Server Pages, a system for providing dynamic web pages powered by Frink.
· Frink is a full-fledged programming language with arrays, dictionaries, functions, loops, even object-oriented programming and self-evaluation.
· Frink allows Object-Oriented Programming, which allows you to create complex data structures that are still easy to use.
· Java Introspection layer allows you to call any Java code from within Frink.
· Frink can also be embedded in a Java program, giving your Java programs all the power of Frink.
· Did I mention it's free? If you find it useful, please donate something. I'd really appreciate it!

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· This release fixes a problem where exponentiation to a large negative rational power could underflow.
· It is strongly recommended to update to this version.
· Animation of Frink graphics is now possible.
· Symbolic simplification of expressions has also been improved.
· In addition, the Java Web Start files have been improved to allow more robustness when not connected to the Internet.