ANNOUNCE: GENIUS 0.7.4 the "DAMN HOT WEATHER" 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

It's so hot in San Diego right now it's not even funny.  In fact it is so hot
that I'm sitting naked at the computer because we lack air conditioning.
I'm also incredibly sweaty.  Yes, you did need to know that.

Anyway I've had sort of bursts of genius hacking lately so in one of those
bursts I've implemented symbolic differentiation, at least very simple one,
mostly just to see how hard symbolic manipulation would be within genius.
And also because it seemed easy.  In another burst of activity I've added
parametric plots.  Other minor bursts produced other minor changes.

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 (at
least glib2 if you don't want a GUI) 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 0.7.4:

* Primitive symbolic derivatives of some expressions
* Parametric plots
* Accepts identifiers as well as functions in a number of places
* SYNTAX: When adding a scalar to a square matrix "A+x" now acts as "A+x*I"
  rather then A+x*ones.  If you want to add a scalar to every element of a
  matrix, use .+ and .- operators.  Behaviour is element by element for vectors
  (1 by n or n by 1 matrices)
* SYNTAX: 'call' now binds tighter to allow "x = f call (x)" to act like
  x=(f(x)) rather then (x=f)(x)
* SYNTAX: allow "identifier + string" which creates a string
* Added functions: IsFunctionOrIdentifier, ComposePower, Derivative,
  SymbolicDerivative SymbolicDerivativeTry, SymbolicNthDerivative,
  SymbolicNthDerivativeTry, SymbolicTaylorApproximationFunction
* Many minor fixes

* And of course Translation updates, damnit I forgot to add those to the NEWS
  file, sorry about that ...

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/genius/0.7/
ftp://ftp.5z.com/pub/genius/
http://www.jirka.org/genius.html

The RPM at the 5z site is built on Fedora Core 3 with all the bells and
whistles of GNOME 2.6/8.  Note that Fedora Core 3 has all the right things.

Note that now a recent MPFR is normally included in genius, so you don't need
to install it separately (the version in FC3 is a little buggy anyway).

You can also build RPMS on older redhat's with rpmbuild -ta <tarball>.

Have fun,

George

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   You have the right not to be killed,
   Murder is a crime!  Unless it was done by a policeman or an aristocrat.
                       -- The Clash