q-lang-users

[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

Re: [q-lang-users] ANN: QCalc

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

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

RC3 is now available from the same spot, and has also been tagged as
R1_0_RC3 in cvs. This has a *lot* of bugfixes and improvements, and
cells spanning multiple rows and columns are now also supported (see the
new Merge cells and Dissociate cells operations in the Edit menu).

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

Re: [q-lang-users] ANN: QCalc

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

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

... and RC4 is out now. More bugfixes, two new active GUI elements, and
I also updated the documentation and added a chapter on the programming
interface. See:

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

As before, the latest cvs snapshot is available here:

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

With the new task button element, it's now really easy to set up
background processing for bulk updates of table cells, as illustrated in
calendar.q, and in fact you can do *any* kind of asynchronous processing
with or without user interaction quite easily (a simple example showing
this is the "countdown" button in guiexamples.q).

In addition, the action buttons allow you to set up any kind of custom
action to be executed just by clicking on the button. The result
returned by the Q expression associated with the button becomes the
value of the cell containing the button. guiexamples.q contains two
simple examples for this, a button which produces random numbers when
clicked, and an "open file" button which invokes the Qt file open dialog
to obtain a filename from the user.

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

Re: [q-lang-users] ANN: QCalc

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

RC5 is out now, featuring more bugfixes and optimizations. Bulk updates
with calclib::matrix and friends are *much* faster and smoother now, and
I also improved the handling of asynchronous messages in realtime
applications.

For those interested in realtime applications using qcalc, I also added
a new example midiio.qcalc which illustrates asynchronous MIDI I/O with
qcalc. (This is still preliminary and only does MIDI input right now.
Also note that you'll need MidiShare and the Q midi module to make this
example work.)

Here's the download link again:

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

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

Re: [q-lang-users] ANN: QCalc

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

I've just uploaded RC6, which has a bunch of additional bugfixes. I also
added a new "browse" mode which makes it much easier to browse the table
and make selections when there are editable GUI elements like comboboxes
and spinboxes, and the MIDI I/O example is now more or less finished.

If anyone noticed any bugs which are still in the latest candidate, then
please let me know asap so that I can try to fix them before the final
1.0 release. TIA.

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

-- 
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

Re: [q-lang-users] ANN: QCalc

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

RC7 now fixes an annoying segfault in the cell editor routine, and adds
two new passive GUI elements to display formatted text and pixmaps.

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

-- 
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

Re: [q-lang-users] ANN: QCalc

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

RC8 is out now. This candidate is now feature-complete and is slated to
become the official 1.0 version soon.

RC8 has the following new features:

- Shift-F3 now opens a multiline cell editor. Handy for complicated
formulas.

- The new task window element allows you to render graphics and
animations inside a table cell. I also added a convenience function to
plot diagrams from spreadsheet data using gnuplot
(http://www.gnuplot.info/).

Please refer to the QCalc manual for details. In particular, the new
gnuplot interface is described here:

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

And here's the link where you can download the sources again:

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

Note that to make the gnuplot interface work, you'll need the very
latest cvs version of gnuplot, available from
http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=2055. For your convenience, I've
also made rpms for this version available, you can find these as
gnuplot-4.3-1*.rpm here:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=96881&package_id=106009

Also, to make the mplayer.qcalc example work, you'll need the very
latest cvs version of the Q interpreter which fixes a bug in the
interpreter's atfork handler. I've also uploaded new rpms as
q-7.8-7*.rpm which have been built from this version; you can find these
here:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=96881&package_id=103965

Cheers,
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

Re: [q-lang-users] ANN: QCalc

[Rob H. <hub...@gm...>]

Hello Albert,


> 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. :)

It sounds good so far.

As you know, with me being a lazy Windoze user, I tend to wait for the
pre-built Windows installer to be made available.


> 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.

Probably. However, I wouldn't want you waiting for me, as I am finding
very little time to use the home PC for my own projects at the moment.
I've not touched any Q code for some months now unfortunately.

Is there any draft documentation I could read yet, or a rough spec of
what is required?


Thanks,
Rob.

Re: [q-lang-users] ANN: QCalc

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

Rob Hubbard wrote:
> As you know, with me being a lazy Windoze user, I tend to wait for the
> pre-built Windows installer to be made available.

That could still take a little while. :( First I need to port Qt/Q to
Windows, and then QCalc needs to be ported to Qt4 (which is the only
recent Qt version available as OSS on Windows).

> Is there any draft documentation I could read yet, or a rough spec of
> what is required?

Well, I still need to write a section on the programming interface for
the QCalc manual, but for the time being the QCalc API is documented
quite extensively in calclib.q itself.

I'm also not sure yet what would be nice to have concerning better
integration of qcalc and the ratutils/polynomial stuff, or if we need
anything along these lines at all. But for some of the more advanced
functions of these modules, which require a bunch of parameters, it
might be nice to provide some simplified convenience functions to make
them easier to use inside a spreadsheet.

Cheers,
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