Re: galculator should be included in Gnome [OT rant]

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Sat, Apr 26, 2003 at 05:07:54PM -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:
> 
> While the concept of copying a simple 4 function calculator may have
> a bit of merit - people are familiar with that - copying a physical
> calculator really is a entirely broken way of presenting a interface
> for interactive calculations.
>
... 
> There are a lot of examples of interfaces that could serve as
> prior art - bc, Mathematica, shell-mode in emacs, etc, etc. Many of
> them admittedly, are experts-only or simply hideous.

If you copied a TI-81 sort of physical calculator, those are already a
mathematical shell sort of like bc/matlab/something, rather than the
old school kind of physical calculator these apps are similar to.

I do think it's right to copy the physical calculator up to a point,
for the basic keypad to just do a multiplication or whatever.  At the
same time I find it hard to imagine using registers by hand when I
have a high-level interpreted language available. ;-)

Havoc