gcalctool - the next generation.

[Rich Burridge <Rich Burridge Sun COM>]

Hi all,

Over the past few months, Sami Pietila has been working on fixing some of
gcalctool's limitations. Namely:

  * the ability to handle arithmetic operator precedence (bug #121710)
  * adding in expression parsing                         (bug #116913)
  * better handling of incorrect syntax in user input    (bug #126126)

This work will also eventually make it much easier to:

  * add in support for reverse polish notation (RPN)     (bug #35045)

This version of gcalctool uses bison for parsing and flex for tokenisation.

Sami's done a great job, and it's now time for peer-review.

As this is still a work-in-progress, we've setup a separate branch under
GNOME CVS to do this. If you've like to try out this new version you can
get the latest from GNOME CVS with:

  % cvs co -r gcalctool-ng gcalctool

There is also a .tar.gz snapshot of the initial version at:

  http://users.utu.fi/~sampie/gcalctool/gcalctool-5.3.42.tar.gz

We've bumped the major version number from 4 to 5. The minor and micro
version numbers will track their equivalent version of gcalctool from
CVS HEAD. In other words, v5.3.42 has all the bug fixes/enhancements of
v4.3.42 plus the features mentioned above.

We are looking for feedback. I'm going to sic Calum on it, for it's UI/HIG
review, but we've also appreciate folks telling us what they think of it.

  * Will it work in other locales?
  * Should arithmetic operator precedence be the default in all modes?

Just to make it clear. This version of gcalctool is not production quality
yet. We've added "Experimental" to the titlebar and the About box. It's not
flashing in large bold red lettering and klaxon.wav isn't playing in the 
background, but hopefully it'll be obvious. If you are planning on building 
any bridges, I suggest that this isn't the calculator for you (just yet).

Our plan is to eventually move this work to CVS HEAD when it's stable and
most (all?) of the bugs have been removed. The timing for this is unknown 
at the moment.

If you find bugs, please report them in Bugzilla as normal, just make sure 
you include the 5.x.y version number so that we know this is a bug for
the gcalctool-ng version.

There is a section in the gcalctool-ng gcalctool TODO file for things that
still need to be done, plus a gcalctool-ng gcalctool FIXME file. Check there
first to see if the problem you've found is already known.

Thanks.

--
Rich Burridge                       Email: rich burridge Sun COM
Sun Microsystems Inc. (MPK14-260),  Phone: +1.650.786.5188
4150 Network Circle,                AIM/YAHOO: RicBurridge
Santa Clara, CA 95054               WWW: http://java.sun.com/people/richb/