[Nickle]A usable calculator again

[Barton C Massey]

Nice job!  

I've checked in the autoconf etc. changes to get nickle to
load DATADIR/nickle/builtin.5c by default.  Note that this
means that running nickle out of the source directory will
load the library from the standard place rather than out of
the source directory: this is arguable, but the alternative
is a giant pain to implement given the current setup.

I import the math namespace in builtin.5c: if this isn't
what people want, we should talk.  (It's what *I* want,
anyway.)

I'll try to update the examples RSN to accomodate various
changes (notably Keith's new .5c extension :-).

Keith: sin(0) seems to infinite-loop for me.  Also,
shouldn't sin(pi) and friends be 0 given the default
precisions of sin() and pi?

I've seen the convention around (and like it) that says that
log == log_base_10, lg == log_base_2, ln == log_base_e.  The
downside is that C math library users will get horribly
surprised.  Perhaps log10(), lg(), ln(), and make log() take
two arguments (base + target)?  Then C users would get
whined at...  Or is everybody happy with log == log_base_e?

		Bart

In message <20010228083105.51B81DF801@orestes.keithp.com> you wrote:
> 
> With much typing, I've replaced the old machine-specific floating point 
> code with arbitrary precision stuff; this is useful, but it temporarily 
> reduced the utility of nickle as a calculator -- the C math library can no 
> longer be used.  
> 
> So I wrote an arbitrary precision math library in nickle itself; with
> Bart's code to load a startup file when nickle launches, we'll be back to
> where we were a week ago, except that there are still a lot of functions to
> implement.
> 
> I've got sqrt, cbrt, exp, log, log10, sin, cos, sin_cos, tan, arcsin,
> arccos, arctan and arctan2.  I'll have to do a bit of work to get the '^'
> operator to use the nickle library code, but I think that's worth the
> effort rather than recoding exp/log in C.
> 
> -keith
> 
> 
> 
> 
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