[Info-gsl] [announce] GSL shell 1.0 released

[Francesco Abbate]

GSL shell 1.0 released

I'm glad to announce, after a lot of work, the final release of GSL
Shell 1.0. This new release brings, among the other things, a lot of
improvements in the graphics functions. Here some of the most
remarkable new features:

    * possibility to put multiple plots on the same windows
    * function to produce animations or interactive plots by using
graphical layers
    * function to save the plot in a file in bitmap format

The graphical rendering code was almost completely rewritten and
optimised for to be efficient both for static plot and animations. You
can find in the download directory also a window binary to try the
program easily but on linux it is easy to compile the program by
yourself. The project home page is http://www.nongnu.org/gsl-shell/ .

We have also a first implementation of a 3D plotting module based on
the JavaScript Pre3d library of Dean Mc Namee. This module give you
the possibility to create simple 3D plots and animations with a simple
interface. Just be aware that, While this module is quite functional
and usable, it could nevertheless replaced in future by a more
efficient implementation. The reason is not the quality of the Pre3d
code, which is excellent in itself, but the usage of JavaScript/Lua
for 3D graphics which is inherently inefficient in term of speed and
memory usage.

>From the point of view of core mathematical functions we have also
some interesting new features:

    * new implementation of the interpolation functions with, notably,
the Akima and cubic spline interpolation
    * improvement of the handling of mixed operation between complex
and real matrix

There is also a new function to produce contour plot over a circular
domain. The previous contour functions was only working on rectangular
domains.

There is also a major change also the matrix operations semantic. Now
GSL shell automatically promote a matrix to complex when the other
operands are complex. This improvement includes the arithmetic
operations, the matrix multiplications functions, and the matrix
operations solve() and inv().

You can try the demo examples with the following commands:

> dofile('examples/pre3d.lua')
> demo1()

or

> dofile('examples/minimize.lua')
> demo1()

In the "examples" folder there are a lot of interesting examples.

I hope you will find GSL Shell useful. In any case don't hesitate to
give me a feedback if you find a bug or if you want suggests some
improvements.

You can also contribute to the project by making a donation and by
expressing you preference about the features that should be
implemented in the next releases.

Enjoy
Francesco