ANNOUNCE: GENIUS 0.5.7 the "0.1^(-1.0) = 0.1 ??" release

[George <jirka 5z com>]

To find out what Genius is, skip a few paragraphs down, or go to
http://www.jirka.org/genius.html

There's not much news in this release except build fixes to allow building
against the newest gtk.  Some new functions and a couple of fixes such.

In any case, Genius is one of the oldest GNOME projects, it has been
the original GNOME calculator before I got wild ideas about it doing
absolutely everything.  It is programmable has a powerful language and
handles many fun features including matlab like support for matrices.
It requires GNOME2 and a recent enough gmp library.  However you can
still use the command line version if you prefer non-gui interface.

There is still a lot of work required to make this all nice, mostly it needs
to have the function library improved and verified to be correct and
documentation needs to be written (the complete help system is not yet in
place).  Feel free to help out :)

Here are the news in 0.5.7:

* Add ErrorFunction (erf), InfiniteProduct, InfiniteProduct2
* Allow large integer powers of 1,-1,1i,-1i and do it very fast
* Be nicer with integer powers of pure imaginary numbers
* mpfr seems broken in 4.1.2 causing something like 0.1^(-1.0) to come out
  as 0.1 rather then 10.  Powers will just use exp and ln for now which
  are correct.
* Fix warnings on Kernel([0])
* Don't use DEPRECATED defines to allow compiling with newer gtk+
* Translation updates (Vincent van Adrighem, Metin Amiroff, Jordi Mallach,
  Xavier Conde Rueda, Christian Rose, Miloslav Trmac, Duarte Loreto,
  Tino Meinen)

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/genius/0.5/
ftp://ftp.5z.com/pub/genius/
http://www.jirka.org/genius.html

Note that making RPMS should be simple with rpmbuild -ta <tarball>, you
should also get the updated GMP RPM which has MPFR enabled since that's
a lot better then internal FP routines of genius.  RPM for that is on
the 5z site.  Apparently Fedora might have MFRP at some point enabled in
GMP.

Note that the RPM at the 5z site is built without GtkSourceView and so
there is no syntax highlighting and other such good stuff.  If you install
GtkSourceView then rebuild the RPM and you'll get much nicer editting
capability.

Have fun,

George

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.
                       -- W. Somerset Maugham