Some ICE design tidbits nonetheless

To avoid sharing no real info about the upcoming changes while remaining silent on the details and "secrets", I thought I'd share certain aspects of the new stuff for those interested in the pending developments surrounding ICE (Integrated Computation Engine) and Cool Calc:

• Either users or programmers will be able to extend the library of supported operations (an operation is a special function, such as your favorite forumula or a built-in function like sine(), etc.).  Two primary extension methods are provided -- human-readable text formulae and programming extensions to the core ICEOperation library.
• Data types are extensible also, meaning that both the simple, scalar types are supported (like integers and decimal/floating point numbers) and also arbitrary data types, such as your favorite list, matrix, data record, or other information-containing 'object'.
• ICE is being designed and documented to eventually be sold separately as a math library for software development, so other engineers can use it in their own application products (and optionally extend it for their own purposes).
• Multiple performance-vs-rich-features models are supported, giving programming users the ability to choose based on their application requirements.
• Future growth into supporting math-education functions, such as equation solution, prime factorization, graphing, etc., is possible, should there be a need for those in a product version down the road.
• ICE will be usable from multiple applications (both MJ App Factory's and others') and also will run on multiple OS platforms, like Windows, Windows 7 Phone, and multiple web browsers.
• ICE will provide the functionality and extensibility options that allow Cool Calc to eventually be a competitive scientific/engineering-calculator product in its own right.  This will of course be a long and extensive process of product enhancement, testing, certification, and support.

That's probably enough tidbits for now.  If anyone is interested to learn more, just send me a note.