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by wtallis 4451 days ago
Some of that was actually built-in to the calculator. The "→Q" and "→Q𝛑" functions took a floating-point number and return a rational number or rational expression in terms of pi. The tolerance for the approximation was determined by how many significant digits the calculator was configured to display. It was pretty nice for a calculator that didn't include a computer algebra system.
2 comments

It was specifically an improved library of those functions. I'll have to dig around on hpcalc.org and see if I can find it again. You could do algebraic calculations if you wrapped the statement in quotes, but once you got used to RPN that made little sense to do.
It was specifically this library: http://www.hpcalc.org/details.php?id=1403.