Re: galculator should be included in Gnome

[Sander Vesik <Sander Vesik sun com>]

On Sat, 26 Apr 2003, Anand Kumria wrote:

> 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/>
> 

Uhh... no, we should not make this a dependncy unless there is a good
reason to. Unless there are good resoans to chnage this part of gcalctool
it should stay as is...

> 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.
> 

Which is actually a big minus for gcalculator

> 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).
> 

This is - just a bug (imho). At least the non-basic modes should
understand it. 

> 	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
>
	Sander

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