GENIUS 0.7.3

GENIUS 0.7.3 has been released:

Something I've been meaning to do for a long time has been to reduce the default precision that genius will have mpfr use for floats. So far it has been 256 bits which is I suppose way overdoing it. It just slows down calculations. Moving to 128 bits speeds up lots of things especially if you evaluate functions like sin or exp a lot and it's way more then is really needed. Reducing further would not get such a dramatic impact and then why would we be using gmp at all, we could have used `double' and saved a lot of trouble (hey a poem!) You can always jack it back up to 256 in the preferences if you really care for so much precision.

You can now do poor mans parametric plots as you can draw arbitrary lines on the line plot window. I was going to do an actual parametric plot function like LinePlot, but I got lazy. So there!

I think in some gdm announcement I said that blinking cursors are evil and so continuing with that theme, there's a preference to turn it off. To show how responsive to user feedback I am, I implemented this whileresponding to the email that suggested it. (but of course, as anyone who recently tried emailing me, getting a response within a month if at all is pure luck).

In any case, Genius is one of the oldest GNOME projects, it has been the original GNOME calculator before I got wild ideas about it doing absolutely everything. It is programmable has a powerful language and handles many fun
features including matlab like support for matrices. It fequires GNOME2 (at least glib2 if you don't want a GUI) and a recent enough gmp library. However you can still use the command line version if you prefer non-gui interface.

There is still a lot of work required to make this all nice, mostly it needs to have the function library improved and verified to be correct and documentation needs to be written (the complete help system is not yet in place). Feel free to help out

Here are the news in 0.7.3:

* Update to mpfr 2.1.1
* Documentation update, document the plotting functions for example.
* Blinking cursor can now be turned off in gnome-genius
* Set default precision to 128 bits. Who needs 256 can set it in the
preferences. Also save/restore the precision
* Add LinePlotClear, LinePlotDrawLine functions to allow drawing arbitrary
lines and to allow a way to do parametric plots until that functionality
is actually added
* Added: NewtonsMethodPoly, wait
* Lots of work on the internal number structure to make it faster/more
memory efficient and to fix some possible bugs/issues
* Fix float formatting bug that sometimes caused hangs and crashes
* Fix large leak on element by element operations
* Fix compilation with external mpfr
* Bunch of other little bugs/issues fixed.
* Translation updates (Adam Weinberger, Miloslav Trmac, David Lodge,
Petrecca Michele, Vincent van Adrighem, Tino Meinen, Jan Moren)

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/genius/0.7/
ftp://ftp.5z.com/pub/genius/
http://www.jirka.org/genius.html

The RPM at the 5z site is built on Fedora Core 3 with all the bells and whistles of GNOME 2.6/8. Note that Fedora Core 3 has all the right things.

Note that now a recent MPFR is normally included in genius, so you don't need to install it separately (the version in FC3 is a little buggy anyway).

You can also build RPMS on older redhat's with rpmbuild -ta lt;tarballgt;.

Have fun,

George