and now for something completely different...

[BarryMead]

I have seen this pattern repeat itself over and over. It seems we as human beings have an instinctive tendency to OVER SIMPLIFY things that we are familiar with and DISMISS the unfamiliar hard work of others. The truth is that the WP-34S project is a VERY SIGNIFICANT piece of HARD WORK contributed by many people and is deserving of a great deal of respect for what it is. It always seems easy to start over from scratch with something familiar, but that is only an ILLUSION. Major projects are more complex than they seem when we first imagine them, and the difficulty is not in the abundance of CREATIVE IDEAS, but in the HARD WORK and dedication of those who carry these ideas over the finish line. As others have pointed out the "Decimal Numbers" C library alone is a significant open source accomplishment and a corner stone of a good calculator design. But this is only a small piece of what the open source community has given to the WP-34S project. There are hundreds of excellent algorithms which are NON-TRIVIAL to write well and have all been developed, debugged, and implemented with special attention to the little algorithm errors that always crop up when you try to turn mathematical theory into a practical implementation. ALL OF THIS would be lost if you start over with a "BASIC" interpreter implementation. You could spend YEARS just getting back to this initial starting point, before you even attempt to contribute anything new. I am not saying this to be discouraging, only to suggest that your time and energy could benefit mankind better by ADDING-ON to rather than REINVENTING the work of the open source calculator community.