ANNOUNCE: GENIUS 0.7.1 the "The derivative" release

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

It seems that people got really excited by all that 3D surfaces talk. I
think I got more hits from this then any time before. This is definite proof
that plotting surfaces has far greater coolness factor then good discrete log
or prime testing abilities. At some point it really ought to start doing
things like eigenvalues and eigenvectors. I think the coolness factor there
is low as well, but damnit, it can't call itself a math package if it can't
do that. The coolness factor of this release then is that you can export
to PNG.

In any case this release is a bunch of fixes and some minor changes. For
one we now have short documentation strings for all built-in functions.
Secondly the continuity and numerical derivative functions now actually work
instead of going into an infinite loop.

One thing that changed is the InfiniteSum and InfiniteProduct functions (and
the alternate versions as well) where they no longer take the tolerance as
an argument but act according to 3 parameters (tolerance, SFS, tries) just
like the other limit functions.

One of the semi pointless optimizations done is that Identity is now
built-in, which means it returns its argument in 0.6 of the time it used to,
aren't you impressed. That is, the most useless function is now faster ...

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 0.7.1:

* Run EPS output through ps2epsi if it's there which adds a bitmap preview,
  even though this bitmap preview is fairly crappy
* Add PNG export for plots
* Remove some parenthesis from output where they are not needed
* SYNTAX: InfiniteSum, InfiniteSum2, InfiniteProduct, InfiniteProduct2,
  now no longer take the tolerance argument and behaviour is controlled
  by the SumProductTolerance, SumProductSFS and SumProductNumberOfTries like
  other limits and they return null when limit can't seem to be found
* Add: NumericalLeftDerivative, NumericalRightDerivative
* Fix the NumericalLimitAtInfinity function and its use and with that fix
  NDerivative (which is now an alias for NumericalDerivative), IsContinuous,
  IsDifferentiable, Limit, LeftLimit, RightLimit
* Fix the specfile and custom CFLAGS are added after the default ones
  (Florin Andrei, me)
* LinePlot and SurfacePlot no longer crash when called without arguments
* Fix EPS/PS export for older gtk
* Fixup compilation of GtkExtra-2 with gcc 3.4
* Bunch of "optimizations" and minor fixes

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 2 with all the bells and
whistles of GNOME 2.6. Note that Fedora Core 2 has all the right things
including MPFR.

You can also build RPMS on older redhat's with rpmbuild -ta <tarball>, you
should also get the updated GMP RPM which has MPFR enabled since that's
a lot better then internal FP routines of genius. RPM for that for
redhat 8 is on the 5z site.

Have fun,

George

-- 
George <jirka_at_5z.com>
   Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who.
                       -- Monty Python