[sugar] Pippy and Calculate

[Reinier Heeres]

Hi there,

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.

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...

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...

Cheers,
Reinier

PS: And of course everybody who's willing to help out can let me know!

Yoshiki Ohshima wrote:
>   Hello,
>
>   Now, we have Pippy.  Into Pippy, the user can type simple
> expressions with some mathematical functions there and execute the
> expression.  This means that there is large overlap between it and
> Calculate.  Since Calculate is overly under-developed and it has very
> complicated interface, we can now think that we have an option to
> remove it from the build without causing too much grief.
>
>   Imagine if Pippy has a button called "Print!", which would be
> located right next to the "Run!"  button.  And, if "Print!" prints out
> the results of running the program into the bottom pane, that is
> pretty much all we need.  (For the record, the workspace in Etoys has
> been there from day one for this purpose.)
>
>   Some small input assistance may be a plus but having the software
> keyboard for numbers is not a good idea anyway.
>
>   We have a real problem of shortage of man-power, so replacing
> smaller activities that take more time to maintain and document with
> more powerful ones is probably a good thing.
>
>   What do you think?
>
> -- Yoshiki
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