Features
How does epher stack up against the calculators people already know? This page compares it with nine scientific calculators and math tools - including where epher comes up short.
The comparison chart
✓ full support · ~ partial · – absent. epher v0.5.37 was probed feature by feature; the nine columns were checked against each product's official documentation.
| Feature | epher | NW | DM | GG | TI | WL | SC | HP | Pr | Oc |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Complex numbers | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Numeric equation solving | ✓ | ✓ | ~ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | – | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Lists as values | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | – | ~ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Regression / curve fitting | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | – | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Probability distributions | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | – | ✓ | ~ |
| Random numbers | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | – | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Matrices | ✓ | ✓ | ~ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | – | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Calculus (derivative / integral) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | – | ✓ | ✓ | ~ |
| Data plots (histogram / box / scatter) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | – | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Units and conversion | ✓ | ✓ | – | – | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | – |
| Exact / fraction results | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ~ | ✓ | ✓ | – |
| Display formats (sci / eng / digits) | ✓ | ✓ | ~ | – | ✓ | – | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Table of values | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ~ | ✓ | ~ | – | ✓ | ✓ | – |
| Automatic points of interest | ✓ | ✓ | ~ | ✓ | ✓ | ~ | – | ✓ | ✓ | – |
| Parameter sliders and animation | ✓ | ~ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ~ | – | ~ | ✓ | – |
| Inequality graphing | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | – | ✓ | ✓ | – |
| Percentage operator | ✓ | – | ✓ | – | – | ~ | ~ | ✓ | – | – |
| Hypothesis tests + confidence intervals | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | – | – | ✓ | ~ |
| Constants library (physics) | ✓ | ✓ | – | – | ~ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | – |
| Finance (TVM / NPV / IRR) | ✓ | ~ | – | ✓ | ✓ | ~ | – | – | ✓ | – |
| Bitwise operations | ✓ | ~ | – | – | ~ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Prime factorization / number theory | ✓ | ✓ | – | ✓ | – | ✓ | – | ~ | ✓ | – |
| Implicit relations (x² + y² = 1) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | – | – | ✓ | – |
| CAS (symbolic algebra) | – | – | – | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | – | ✓ | ✓ | – |
| Exam mode | – | ✓ | – | ✓ | ✓ | – | – | – | ✓ | – |
| Step-by-step solutions | – | – | – | ~ | – | ✓ | – | ✓ | – | – |
| Spreadsheet view | – | – | ~ | ✓ | ✓ | – | – | – | ✓ | – |
| Dynamic geometry | – | – | – | ✓ | ✓ | – | – | – | ✓ | – |
| Programming surface | ~ | ✓ | – | ~ | ✓ | ✓ | – | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Natural-language input | – | – | – | – | – | ✓ | – | – | – | – |
| Curated / live data | – | – | – | – | – | ✓ | – | – | – | – |
NW NumWorks · DM Desmos · GG GeoGebra · TI TI-84 Plus CE / TI-Nspire CX II · WL WolframAlpha / Wolfram Language · SC SpeedCrunch · HP HiPER Scientific · Pr HP Prime · Oc MATLAB / GNU Octave.
Where epher is missing
No computer-algebra system (CAS), no exam mode, no step-by-step solutions, no spreadsheet view, no dynamic geometry, no natural-language input, and no curated or live data. These are deliberate boundaries, not oversights: epher computes with numbers, exactly, on your own machine.
The programming surface is partial: strings, for-loops and print exist; keyboard input, file I/O and multiple return values do not.
Where epher stands alone
- Four native interface modes with one memory: a desktop app, and in the terminal a one-shot CLI, an interactive REPL, and a full-screen TUI. The same history, saved functions, constants and scripts answer in all of them - none of the nine carries one store across that many native frontends.
- A fully featured web app in a sandbox: installable on phone and desktop, offline after the first load, every evaluation on-device - no accounts, no cookies, no server calls - with the scripts, the guide and the whole keypad embedded.
- Sharing is caring: any history item shares as a link that carries the expression itself, and the person who opens it runs the maths on their own device - no account, no cloud copy in between. Pasted as plain text, it runs in every epher frontend, terminal ones included.
- An offline solar system: a live ephemeris for the Sun, the Moon, the planets and Pluto - positions, rise and set times, phases, magnitudes - and a 3D orrery you can animate. None of the nine has one.
- 433 scripts ship inside every installer - moon phases, matrices, finance, astronomy - each with a transcript that is verified against the engine on every change.
- The full user guide speaks eight languages, identical in the web app, the desktop app, the terminal, and on this website.
Method
The chart comes from a three-pass feature analysis (baseline, rerun, and this one), re-probing epher and re-checking every app column against primary sources - the full notes, with sources and dates, are in the repository: calculator-gap-analysis-3rd.md.
Questions
If a row looks wrong, say so: open an issue on GitHub with what your calculator does, and the chart will be corrected.