[ann] GSL shell 1.0-beta1 release / please test

[Francesco Abbate <francesco.bbt@...>]

Hi all,

I'm happy to announce, after a lot of work, the 1.0-beta1 release of GSL shell.

Here you have:
* the project page, http://www.nongnu.org/gsl-shell/index.html
* the download area, http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/gsl-shell/
* the window binaries,
http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/gsl-shell/gsl-shell-1.0-beta1-win-x86.zip
* the git repository, git://git.sv.gnu.org/gsl-shell.git
  or http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gsl-shell.git for the web interface
* the source tarball:
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gsl-shell.git/snapshot/gsl-shell-1.0-beta1.tar.gz

Among the most interesting things in this release you have:
- a completely new graphical system.
  Now you can put multiple plot is a single window (or put a plot in
multiple windows, if you want), have different
  graphical layers and do animations
- a 3D graphical library based on the JavaScript Pre3d library of Dean
Mc Namee (it is the base of the JavaScript monster demo).
  The library was (quite easily) rewritten in Lua, the most painful
things was the lack of the "continue" statement and the different
indexing conventions :-)
- a better system to handle operations between real and complex matrix
and between scalar and matrices. Now a matrix is automatically
promoted to complex if needed and most operations like 'solve', 'inv',
etc works with both real or complex matrices
- an implementation of the interpolation function with cspline and
akima interpolation
- a wonderful module for contour plot entirely written in Lua. It does
support both rectangular and circular domains. There is also an
experimental module 'hpcontour' for differentiable functions that
produces beautiful contour plots.

 You can have a taste of what you can do by loading the demo files in
the 'examples' directory. For example:
> dofile('examples/pre3d.lua')
> demo1().

The most featured examples are: pre3d, 3d, anim, minimize, contour,
hpcontour, plot, graphics, nlinfit, linfit, cspline-example and a few
others.

Of course there can be bugs, this is a beta. I would like if you can
test it also on x64 platforms. I would like also to have your advice
about the general design of the interface.

I hope to have many feedbacks.

Best regards,
Francesco