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From: ejkst@cisunx.UUCP (Eric J. Kennedy)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: DEcartes and Mabndelbrot
Message-ID: <16024@cisunx.UUCP>
Date: 20 Feb 89 20:12:40 GMT
References: <9321@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Reply-To: ejkst@unix.cis.pittsburgh.edu (Eric J. Kennedy)
Organization: Univ. of Pittsburgh, Comp & Info Sys
Lines: 33

In article <9321@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> rlcarr@athena.mit.edu (Rich Carreiro) writes:
>Can anyone tell me the status of Decartes?  It's a neat 2-D graphics
>program that hass al sorts of graphing optins, I saw version 1.0 of
>it somewhere.  Is it commercial?  Freeware?  Shareware?  Anyone know?

I have Descartes version 1.0.  To my knowledge, that is the most recent
version.  It is a commercial product, marketed by Mindware.  I paid
about $35 for it.

Descartes does a decent job at plotting equations, letting you plot
multiple lines, and in multiple colors, use trig and hyperbolic
functions; it will do derivatives (in closed form, not numeric
solutions).  With the 1.3 printer drivers, you can even get some decent
printed output.  It's still bitmap output, though, so you have to
experiment, and your choices will be limited.

Don't expect to use it for plotting data, as it can't generate plots
using input data.  It also has no provisions for adding legends, labels,
or titles.  Just numbers and tic marks on the axes.  This is its major
shortcomming, in my opinion.

It also does some Very Bad Things with regard to proper Amiga
programming.  It busy-waits, even when waiting for requester input,
slowing down the system needlessly.  I run it at priority -1 to get
around that.  It also has some hard-coded paths, which I patched using
NewZap so I could use it more conveniently on my hard disk.

I'd call it an okay first try.  I'd love to see it fixed and upgraded,
but I haven't heard anything to that effect.

-- 
Eric Kennedy
ejkst@cisunx.UUCP