Re: galculator should be included in Gnome

[Rich Burridge <Rich Burridge Sun COM>]

I'd like to address a few inaccuracies in your summary:

Anand Kumria wrote:
> 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.

gcalctool does not use Glade. You are right that the graphics are highly 
abstracted. It's predecessors (over the last 15 years) have have graphical
versions for Suntools, SunView, X11, Motif, XView, NeWS, MGR. There was also 
a term based version.

It would be trivial to generate a tty based version of the latest one in
GNOME CVS.

> Feature wise:
>
>	galculator
>		- uses libm; which will do for 90% of uses but doesn't
>		  do arbitary precision.

Really? How can you tell when you have the correct answer?

>		- provides better visual feedback on what it is doing

gcalctool used to have that. I was told by the HCI person to take it out.
Again, it would be trivial to add it back in. 
	
>	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>

It uses a C version of the original FORTRAN code (converted from FORTRAN
to C about 13 years ago). Pretty rock solid. 

What would the other 5% require?

>		- has financial mode (but it doesn't compare to a HP 14B)

But better than nothing, right? ;-)

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

Maybe, if it can be proved to be as solid as the MP conversion has been 
for me.

> 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.

Doing it this way, I can type numbers in all with "lower case" keys. Note
that there is an open bug against gcalctool to come up with a better 
completely unique set of keyboard equivalents. Bug #104249. I challenge 
anybody to come up with an HCI approved set of values.

Another thing to note was that calctool, the predecessor of gcalctool, had
a special key that allowed you to toggle the labels on all the calctool
buttons so that you could see the keyboard equivalents. The gcalctool 
equivalent is to include this information in a section of the online help.


One other thing, while we are doing a comparison list:

gcalctool allow you to define upto ten constants and ten user defined
functions.