[Gsl-shell-info] [ANN] GSL Shell 2.2.0 release

[Francesco Abbate]

Dear all,

I'm pleased to annonce the final release of GSL Shell 2.2.0. The
source code is available as usual from the git repository at github:

https://github.com/franko/gsl-shell

There are also some binary packages available for Window and
Debian/Ubuntu. The address for the downloads is the following:

http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/gsl-shell/

For the moment only the 32bit x86 packages are available.

** NEWS **

Now GSL Shell use the OpenBLAS library for BLAS operations. The
OpenBLAS library can effectively benefit from multicore CPUs and can
bring an important improvement in the execution time for large matrix
operations.

Some features were added like the ability to export an SVG file with
the whole content of a window. This is nice to have when many plots
are arranged in the same window.

A new integrated help system is now available using the "help"
function. It is not a substitute to the complete documentation but it
is useful in case you don't remember exactly how a function is
supposed to be used or the exact name of a method. Not all the
functions are completely documented and I would greatly appreciate
contribution in this sense.

GSL Shell does have now a GUI interface based on the FOX library. With
this release the user interface is now considered stable, all the
features are implemented including multiple plot windows and
animations. The console is also completely suitable to be used instead
of the console application aven if there is definetely room for
improvement.

Unfortunately the GUI interface does not work on Mac OS X for the
moment. I would like to fix this problem but I would need some help
since I don't have a Mac OS X that I can use to test.

In term of the algorithms the only change is a better implementation
of the VEGAS MonteCarlo integration routine made by Lesley.

** FUTURE **

For the future I will probably focus on the following points:

- OpenGL based 3D graphics plotting system

- data table (similar to GNU R data frame) to work with tabular data
  * helper functions to plot/explore data table (similar to Excel pivot table)
  * interactive visualization and modification of the data with User Interface

Other feature I would like to implement, but now sure if and when I
will be able to do.

- implement a "style" attribute in plot to choose between different
plotting styles
- possibility to change interactively a plot with the user interface
- ODE integrator for system with large number of variables
- ODE integrator that use the Jacobian
- Minimization algorithms implementation
- Roots finding algorithms implementation
- Statistical function implementation (bindings to GSL functions)
- auto completion for code and tooltips with function synoptics
- possibility to save on a file matrices or plots to be later retrieved
- improvement of pretty-printing for matrices and tables

Recently a GSL Shell user with me his implementation of polynomials
for the purpose of filter implementation. I would like to include at
least a part of this work in GSL Shell but for the moment I didn't
have enough time to work on that.

Of course any contribution is welcome to help me develop GSL Shell.

Francesco