Re: galculator should be included in Gnome

[Rich Burridge <Rich Burridge Sun COM>]

Hi Simon,

> I'm the author of galculator and want to comment on the current discussion.

Excellent.
 
> > There are HIG-compliance issues. 
> 
> That's right. At the moment galculator isn't very HIG conform. This is an 
issue
> I will address ASAP. 

Cool. Which GNOME HIG person are you working with?

> But on the other hand the possibility to do calculations with upto 40 digits
> isn't a feature I expect from a desktop calculator. From my point of view a
> desktop calculator supports the user in doing (small) calculations on the 
paper
> (or even replaces that paper). If there are such big numbers I probably had to
> change to a bigger mathematical software package anyway. (In fact, I never got
> a feature request for supporting multiple-precision.)

Just because it's there, doesn't mean you have to use it. It's adds 2 and 2
and still gets the right answer. In fact, if I hadn't mentioned about the
40 digit numeric input, most people wouldn't have realised it. 

> >From my point of view, galculator includes two very important features not
> mentioned in the current discussion:
> 
> Firstly, galculator supports RPN (reverse polish notation - a stack based
> approach on doing computations). Some users simply don't use a calculator not
> supporting RPN.

I agree, this is a nice feature for those that need it. How many is that?
 
> Secondly, galculator pays respect to arithmetic precedence. Doing 1+2*3 you 
get
> 7 as the correct result in galculator (like gcalc), but gcalctool gives
> you 9 (1+2=3, 3*3=9). In my opinion one can't demand the user to think about
> arithmetic precedence and to resolve it with braces. Arithmetic precedence
> handling is a first step towards "Typing something in as it's written on paper
> should give the correct answer straight off".

Good luck with this when you take it to your HCI person. calctool and
sdtcalctool (gcalctool predecessors) have had a *lot* of HCI input and
usability testing, and this functionality did not go well with them.

Also you should consider comparing against the software calculator that
probably most of the world is using - the one that comes with Windows.
I just tried 1+2*3 there and it gives 9.