ANNOUNCE: GENIUS 0.7.6.1 the "Newton is dead, long live mpfr_pow" 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

So I decided to release a minor update because there was quite a showstopper.
Try graphing "x^(1/3)" with any recent version and get ready to kill genius
since it hung.  I suppose what happened is that the implementation of
Newton's algorithm to compute rational powers became unstable when mpfr was
upgraded (not to fault mpfr, my algorithm was kind of crap).  It makes no
sense to use newton anyway, we can just use mpfr_pow once we take care of the
signs and all that.  It may be slightly slower I would guess, but it's more
tested and it works.

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.

Here are the news in 0.7.6.1:

* Fix rational powers

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

Note that a recent MPFR is normally included in genius and it is build as a
private static library, so you don't need to install it separately, though
I'd recommend using 2.2.0 and building against it as a shared library.

I no longer run Fedora, but Ubuntu.  So no more RPMS, but you should be able
to build RPMS with rpmbuild -ta <tarball>.  I don't have any DEBs for genius
because I'm lazy I suppose.

Have fun,

George

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely
   once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
                       -- Abba Eban, 1970