The programming environment

With ongoing standardization in the Linux/Unix world we now witness two strong GUI libraries that run on almost all Linux and Unix machines: the Gnome libraries and the KDE libraries, the latter build around a core of Qt libraries. The Statistical Data Viewer is build on the core Qt libraries. They are open source, fast, strictly object oriented, well documented and to my judgment quite beautiful. They are written in C++. A powerful programming environment for KDE and Qt is available, KDevelop, which improves and speeds up the development of large applications. Finally, Qt is platform independent. Trolltech, the Norwegian company which develops Qt, takes great care to guarantee correct execution of code written for its Qt libraries on the major Linux and Unix distributions as well as on MacIntosh and Microsoft Windows machines. Though the code has to be compiled again on each system, the fast and reliable performance justifies this extra step.

Arbitrary precision library

To have full control over the arbitrary precision arithmetic and to optimize the essential time consuming algorithms, the application uses an independent arbitrary precision library: MAPM. MAPM is a portable arbitrary precision math library which is open source. While most other arbitrary precision libraries emphasize integer arithmetic, this library was specifically designed for floating point arithmetic. A notable oddity of this library is that it handles precision in digits, not in bits.

Special thanks to Michael C. Ring who designed the library.