Gnumeric Pure plugin 0.3 released

[Albert Graef <Dr Graef t-online de>]

(I hope that it's appropriate to announce 3rd party plugins here, if not
then I apologize.)

This is a fairly new Gnumeric plugin which lets you use Pure (an
algebraic/functional programming language based on term rewriting, see
http://pure-lang.googlecode.com/) to program Gnumeric functions. Works
more or less like the existing Perl and Python plugins, but it offers
some features which go well beyond these:

- Pure has a built-in MATLAB/Octave-like matrix type which lets you deal
with Gnumeric cell ranges in a convenient and efficient way.

- Pure has lazy data structures, thus you can compute with stuff like
the infinite list of all prime numbers. The plugin provides an operation
to turn these into asynchronous data sources which are executed as
background tasks. Of course, you can also use this facility for realtime
data input from sensors, stock tickers etc.

- Pure has an easy C interface, thus this plugin effectively enables you
to use any C function in Gnumeric without having to write C code.

- Pure is JIT-compiled to native code (using LLVM), thus scripts load
slower but then execute much faster than equivalent interpreted Perl and
Python code.

- The plugin has support for rendering OpenGL scenes (both stills and
animations) in Gnumeric frame widgets, via Pure's OpenGL interface (this
requires GtkGLExt).

More information, documentation, screenshots, sources etc. can be found
here: http://code.google.com/p/pure-lang/wiki/Addons#gnumeric-pure

For convenience, here's the direct download link:
http://pure-lang.googlecode.com/files/gnumeric-pure-0.3.tar.gz

(Note that in order to use this plugin, you also need to have Pure
installed; detailed instructions can be found at the Pure website. If
you run into problems, don't hesitate to contact me off-list or on the
Pure mailing list at http://groups.google.com/group/pure-lang.)

Enjoy. :)
Albert

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email:  Dr Graef t-online de, ag muwiinfa geschichte uni-mainz de
WWW:    http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag