[q-lang-users] ANN: QCalc

[Albert G. <Dr....@t-...>]

Hi again,

this just in from our "nifty and experimental new stuff" department, for
those of you who like to live on the bleeding edge. :)

There's a new QCalc application, which is a spreadsheet-like frontend to
the Q interpreter. This is currently only available in cvs, and is still
being worked on, but the revisions tagged as R1_0_RCn (where n=1,2
currently) should already be usable. Preliminary documentation
(including screenshots) can be found here:

http://q-lang.sourceforge.net/qcalc/qcalc.html

Note that this program needs Qt/Q 1.2 (Qt3 has been tested, Qt4 probably
needs some work). Bug reports and patches are appreciated. You can find
the cvs sources here:

http://q-lang.cvs.sourceforge.net/q-lang/qcalc/

For your convenience, I've also uploaded a current cvs snapshot. You can
find that here:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=96881&package_id=251927

(That tarball is rather big, as it also contains the docbook'ified
online documentation and the complete Q language manual. If you go with
the cvs sources you'll have to generate the documentation using 'make',
which requires docbook and texinfo.)

I think that this application is a real killer, as it makes using Q so
much more convenient, and it also has the potential to eventually
replace QPad on Windows, as soon as Qt/Q has been ported there and the
remaining portability issues have been sorted out. I also have plans to
add more support operations (the stuff in calclib.q) for graphics and
multimedia, which would turn QCalc into a kind of crossover of Excel and
Ableton Live on steroids.

Eddie Rucker has already been working on some mathematical support
operations for qcalc (numeric integration and statistics stuff). This
isn't included in the package yet (sorry, Eddie, didn't have the time to
look at it yet), so if you want this, please get in touch with him (he's
on this list).

NB, Eddie: I guess you're still running RC1 right now, if you have the
time could you please check out R1_0_RC2 and tell me whether it still
works with your spreadsheets? RC2 has a brandnew depth-first-search
evaluation algorithm which also works with cyclic cell dependencies.

NB, Rob: This isn't quite the Q+Q/Q[i][X] calculator program I promised
a while ago, but it should be even better-suited for that purpose. :)
But maybe it would be useful to work on ratutils.q and polynomial.q, in
order to provide more "QCalc-friendly" frontends for some of the
operations of these modules? If you're interested, please get in touch
or post to the ml.

Enjoy! :)
Albert

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