ANNOUNCE: GENIUS 0.5.5 the "That was a Math degree not a CS one!" 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

The degree I have is a mathematics one and not a CS one.  This means
that I'm allowed to release crappy code, as long as all the mathematics is
right.  Which is what happened.  The IDE interface stuff really sucked in
the last version, would pretty surely crash before saving the second time,
and just generally was kind of sucky.  Now it's less sucky.  I have actually
been using it now so I fixed all the obvious problems with it and also added
things to make it easier to use.  Other then that I added a few functions,
(like square roots modulo a prime), that I needed, but it's a fairly minor
update only, but major bugfixing for the GUI.

Again you should really get a GMP with MPFR enabled as it includes much
better floating point routines then the native genius ones.  The 5z site has
an RPM for you redhat people (since redhat doesn't seem to ship gmp with
--enable-mpfr).

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 0.5.5:

Note the syntax changes marked with 'SYNTAX:'

* Fix quite a few DOH! errors in the GUI it should now be usable to
  actually edit and save file and all that
* Also print the number line in the status box, this makes it much easier
  to find parse errors.
* Add SqrtModPrime, IsPrimitiveModWithPrimeFactors,
  SilverPohligHellmanWithFactorization
* SYNTAX: use SqrtModPrime when sqrt is called in mod context (only if the
  modulo is a prime, otherwise we print an error)
* Other minor fixes.
* Some new translations apparently too (Swedish by Christian Rose)

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

(Note that at the 5z.com site there are also some RPMS for RH9, which may
work for RH8.  The menuitem is now in the Office/Other menu.  There is also a
GMP RPM for RH8 and RH9 which enables MPFR and I recommend upgrading to that.)

Have fun,

George

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   When the rich make war it's the poor that die.
                       -- Jean-Paul Sartre