Acknowledgments

EXTREMA has evolved from software developed over the years at TRIUMF, Canada's national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics. The need for a general purpose graphics and analysis package was seen early and the first such program was OPDATA, created, using FORTRAN, by C.J. Kost, Philip Bennett, and Arthur Haynes. The next program, PLOTDATA, also in FORTRAN, used many ideas from OPDATA, but had a different, more user friendly, interface, and was created by Joseph Chuma in 1983. At the heart of OPDATA and PLOTDATA was the expression evaluator, but it was limited in that only element-by-element operations were possible, and variable indices were not allowed in expressions. Philip Bennett and Joe Chuma re-wrote the expression evaluator, again in FORTRAN, allowing for array operations and indices on variables, functions, and entire expressions. This work was incorporated into a new program, PHYSICA, which also introduced many other new graphics and analysis features. After a few aborted attempts at creating a GUI for PHYSICA using X-Designer@ for Motif@, EXTREMA for Microsoft Windows@ was born. EXTREMA for Windows was written completely in C++ by Joe Chuma, and currently must be built with Borland C++Builder@ running under 32 bit Windows. Finally, EXTREMA was ported to Linux using wxWidgets, an open source cross-platform toolkit.

EXTREMA makes use of the wxWidgets toolkit, which is "a single, easy-to-use API for writing GUI applications on multiple platforms that still utilize the native platform's controls and utilities." Information on the wxWidgets project can be found at `http://wxwidgets.org`.

GNU General Public License