[sugar] Pippy and Calculate

[Yoshiki Ohshima]

  Reinier,

  Firstly, I apologize if my first email sounded too harsh to you.
(It definitely didn't mean to be personal.)

> Being the main Calculate developer, I don't agree on your opinion about 
> Calculate. I think it deserves to be a separate activity. It's true that 
> it was a little underdeveloped lately, but that was mainly because I was 
> on a (long) holiday. The last couple of days have produced major 
> improvements in Calculate: tab-completion of variable names, copy-paste, 
> journal support, etc. (not sure if it made it into the build yet, did a 
> release though: http://rwh.corps.nl/Calculate-7.xo). More new features 
> are coming, for example I just started working on a plot() function (an 
> obviously useful extension), which I estimate to be functioning 
> somewhere next week.

  It was not so much as Calculate is underdeveloped or not, I
think. (Almost every end-user software including Etoys is
underdeveloped). But looking at the similarity of Pippy and Calculate,
for example the plot feature you are making could be beneficial for
both, right?  And, you would wish to have a calculator whose syntax is
closer to Python, right?

> There seem to be some performace issues with Calculate on the XO. I 
> haven't been able to profile these yet, but I expect them to be related 
> to the way the application is shared (basic sharing should be 
> functioning). This problem has the highest priority now...

  Yes.  I filed a bug report for it.  The length of old expressions
seems to be strongly affecting the performance.

> The equation parser I wrote isn't perfect yet either, although in 
> general it does a pretty good job at parsing simple as well as more 
> complex expressions. Please file bug reports if you notice weird behavior...

  Yes.  I did it, too.  It must be something to do with an error within
parenthesis.

-- Yoshiki