ANNOUNCE: GENIUS 0.7.2 the "Constant Strings" release

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

And you thought Genius would never have exciting documentation. Oh well
got me on the exciting part, but it's now docbook thanks to Kai Willadsen
who put the whole thing into DocBook and added some text of his own. This
got me started and I spent two days polishing it a bit to get a nicer
function reference and fix random errors and typos and things.

Also the name of the release owes to the fact that constant strings are now
actually constant. This saves a bunch of time/memory when running functions
which have strings in them (such as for argument checking and similar).

Some people have sent in some GEL code, MoebiusMu by Alessio Frusciante
and LUDecomposition by David W. Hutchison. A bunch of other functions has
also been added, see below.

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 0.7.2:

* The manual is in Docbook and has been greatly updated (Kai Willadsen, me)
  there is even the beginnings of a detailed function reference with links
  to Planetmath and Mathworld.
* Better help integration
* We have an icon (Eugenia Loli-Queru)
* Include internal MPFR which is more recent and less buggy then ones
  found on most people's systems (this makes it easier to compile genius
  too)
* Added: CompositeSimpsonsRuleTolerance, GaussFunction, GaussDistribution,
  BernoulliNumber, ExactDivision, MoebiusMu (Alessio Frusciante),
  IsNonNegativeInteger, LUDecomposition (David W. Hutchison),
  EulersMethod, RungeKutta
* Fixed, round, ceil, trunc and Hofstadter
* Few more functions now apply over matrixes with matrix arguments
* CompositeSimpsonsRule and Divides are built in for speed
* Treat strings as constants, thus getting pretty good speedups where
  strings are used
* When new references are encountered where the variable does not exist we
  create the variable in the current context
* On the plot window use "y=" as a label to indicate what goes in the text
  boxes
* "New" toolbar item
* Fix crashes on non-number matrix multiplies
* Bunch of minor fixes all over
* Help texts are being translated now
* Translation updates (Adam Weinberger, David Lodge, Miloslav Trmac,
  Amanpreet Singh Alam, Raphael Higino, Vincent van Adrighem,
  Tino Meinen, Jan Morén, Laurent Dhima, Takeshi AIHANA,
  Francisco Javier F. Serrador)

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_at_5z.com>
   If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.
                       -- Voltaire