kcalc suggestions

[Raphael Kubo da Costa]

On Saturday 17 April 2010 11:58:23 Eike Krumbacher wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> By selecting the buttons from the menu, one has the ability to calculate
> the square root of a5-bit number and show the result as some bits, which
> is strange but at least gives a wrong result.
Calculating the sqrt of 10000 (16) showed me 100 (4), which is correct, isn't 
it?

> IMHO, kcalc should have exact modes:
> 
> 1* Easy mode: just the numbers and some basic operations
> 2* Engineer mode: trigonometric and x^2, sqrt(x) and so on + constants
> 3* Statistic mode engineer+statistics buttons
> 4* Logic mode: bit edit, hex, oct, dec and bin selection, but not x! or
> x*y^z and so on
Do you mean having these separate, mutually exclusive modes instead of the 
current non-exclusive "Engineering Buttons", "Logic Buttons" approach?

> 
> Furthermore, I would like to suggest to reduce the abilities to this,
> what kcal really can do. Actually, its's a mixture of features, which do
> not really fit together, like a very good factorial, which can compute
> the factorial of all atoms in the universe but cannot calculate
> log(10^400). The reason for this might be the underlaying  math lib
> "gmp", which  can not  do some math things, a calculator needs. IMHO, we
> should remove gmp completly and live with what libm gives us.
I have zero knowledge of the pros and cons of libgmp (and mostly of libgmp 
itself). Isn't it possible to use both?

> What do you think?
I think KCalc has no active maintainer, nor anyone who is in the position of 
taking those project/design decisions.

I'm not sure of what to do in this case - Friedrich, as the kde-utils 
coordinator, might have something to say here.

For me, if you come up with patches to do those things that look good and 
preferrably don't introduce feature regressions, I'll just keep reviewing them 
and committing (that is, until you get an SVN account and become KCalc's 
maintainer ;D).