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-CONTENTS:

-

-1. Introduction.

-2. Getting Started.

-3. Calctool history.

-4. Acknowledgements.

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-

-1. Introduction.

-----------------

-

-This is mate-calc, a fork of gnome-calc, the calculator application that was

-previously in the OpenWindows Deskset of the Solaris 8 operating system.

-

-It incorporates a multiple precision arithmetic packages based on the work

-of Professor Richard Brent, who has also kindly given me permission to make

-it available.

-

-There is a single graphics driver for Gtk3 included with this release.

-

-

-2. Getting started.

--------------------

-

-The manual pages also describe how to use mate-calc in detail.

-

-

-3. Calctool history.

---------------------

-

-Calctool was a project I worked on before I joined the OpenWindows DeskSet

-engineering group at Sun. It was originally released to comp.sources.unix

-in the late 1980's, and worked with many different graphics packages

-including SunView, X11, Xview, NeWS and MGR. There was also a version

-that worked on dumb tty terminals.

-

-It used a double-precision maths library that was a combination of the work

-of Fred Fish and various routines that were in the BSD 4.3 maths library.

-

-A lot of people in the community provided feedback in the form of comments,

-bug reports and fixes. In 1990, I started working in the DeskSet engineering

-group. I was working for Sun Microsystems in Australia at the time, (having

-moved there from England in 1983).

-

-I searched around looking for multiple precision maths libraries and found

-a package called MP written in FORTRAN by Richard Brent. I converted it to C,

-adjusted the glue between the resultant code and the calctool code, and this

-went on to be the basis of the calculator that was in the OpenWindows DeskSet.

-I also added scientific, financial and logical modes. This calctool was also

-the basis of the dtcalc application that is a part of CDE (albeit I had

-nothing to do with that).

-

-With its inclusion in the MATE CVS repository, it was renamed to mate-calc.

-

-More recently, Sami Pietila provided arithmetic precedence support and

-Robert Ancell converted the UI to use Glade.

-

-

-4. Acknowledgements.

---------------------

-

-See the AUTHORS file.

-

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-

-Suggestions for further improvement would be most welcome, plus bug reports

-and comments.

-

-The Mate Team.