-------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS:

1. Introduction.
2. Getting Started.
3. Calctool history.
4. Acknowledgements.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

1. Introduction.
----------------

This is mate-calc, a fork of gnome-calc, the calculator application that was
previously in the OpenWindows Deskset of the Solaris 8 operating system.

It incorporates a multiple precision arithmetic packages based on the work
of Professor Richard Brent, who has also kindly given me permission to make
it available.

There is a single graphics driver for Gtk2 included with this release.


2. Getting started.
-------------------

The manual pages also describe how to use mate-calc in detail.


3. Calctool history.
--------------------

Calctool was a project I worked on before I joined the OpenWindows DeskSet
engineering group at Sun. It was originally released to comp.sources.unix
in the late 1980's, and worked with many different graphics packages
including SunView, X11, Xview, NeWS and MGR. There was also a version
that worked on dumb tty terminals.

It used a double-precision maths library that was a combination of the work
of Fred Fish and various routines that were in the BSD 4.3 maths library.

A lot of people in the community provided feedback in the form of comments,
bug reports and fixes. In 1990, I started working in the DeskSet engineering
group. I was working for Sun Microsystems in Australia at the time, (having
moved there from England in 1983).

I searched around looking for multiple precision maths libraries and found
a package called MP written in FORTRAN by Richard Brent. I converted it to C,
adjusted the glue between the resultant code and the calctool code, and this
went on to be the basis of the calculator that was in the OpenWindows DeskSet.
I also added scientific, financial and logical modes. This calctool was also
the basis of the dtcalc application that is a part of CDE (albeit I had
nothing to do with that).

With its inclusion in the MATE CVS repository, it was renamed to mate-calc.

More recently, Sami Pietila provided arithmetic precedence support and
Robert Ancell converted the UI to use Glade.


4. Acknowledgements.
--------------------

See the AUTHORS file.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Suggestions for further improvement would be most welcome, plus bug reports
and comments.

The Mate Team.