Re: galculator should be included in Gnome

[Anand Kumria <wildfire progsoc uts edu au>]

On Sat, Apr 26, 2003 at 02:26:29PM +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> Hey,
> 
> The release team received this suggestion - seems there are quite a few
> people agreeing that galculator "feels" a lot nicer than gcalctool, though
> there have also been suggestions that the code is less than desireable.

Kcalc, gcalctool and galculator all abstract away the display from the
numerical calculations and the code is all pretty similiar. I've got a
version of kcalc with a GTK front-end on it for instance, not much work
involved to change the front end. Both gcalctool and galculator use
glade for display creation.

Feature wise:

	galculator
		- uses libm; which will do for 90% of uses but doesn't
		  do arbitary precision.
		- provides better visual feedback on what it is doing
	
	gcalctool
		- uses MP (Fortran arbitary precision package), which
		  will do for about 95% of people
		<URL: http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/oucl/work/richard.brent/pub/pub043.html>
		- has financial mode (but it doesn't compare to a HP 14B)

Both should probably use MPFR instead to do arbitary precision.
<URL: http://www.loria.fr/projets/mpfr/>

gcalctool has odd key bindings (for example), hexadecimal can only be
entered in lowercase on the keyboard. The shifted variants of A, B, C,
D, E and F do things like turn off hexdecimal and change signs, etc.
Very unintuitative.

galculator doesn't do scientific / fixed precision mode (because it uses
libm), nor does it provide 'canned' configurations like gcalctool's
Basic, Scientific or Financial modes.

Neither have a statistical mode like Kcalc.

Both of them are strictly "operations sequence mode" rather than
being able to do "textbook mode" / "formula entry". For example:

	1 + log 10 = 11 on all calculators (kcalc, gcalctool and
	galculator).

	On a Casio FX-100V (1992 vintage!) it knows enough to output
	correct answer as 2. There doesn't appear to be a image of a
	100V, but the closest model is probably a fx4000p.

	<URL: http://www.voidware.com/calcs/casio.htm>
	<URL: http://www.rskey.org/fx4000p.htm>

Casio FX's are probably good candidate calculators to test against since
they are 'approved' calculator in both Australia and UK secondary schools 
and universities.

Regards,
Anand

> 
> gcalctool certainly needs some appearance love. :-)
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> - Jeff
> 
> <quote who="Anand Kumria">
> 
> > Hi there,
> > 
> > I've been playing with and using galculator for quite a while now.
> > 
> > I've also used gcalctool as well.
> > 
> > I think galculator would be a far better calculator replacement for
> > gcalc than gcalctool. 
> > 
> > Please reconsider.
> > 
> > galculator, <URL: http://members.vol.at/home.floery/electronix/galculator/>
> > 
> > Regards,
> > Anand
> 
> -- 
> linux.conf.au 2004: Adelaide, Australia         http://lca2004.linux.org.au/
>  
>                         We're passe with class, eh?

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