This comment came from Dave via:
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/richb/20041108#gcalctool_devolves

Another comment:

"(Also that minus (−) looks like it's actually a hyphen (-), but that really is
a nitpick)".

Talking about this with Hidetoshi Tajima, he is suggesting 
that this should really be done via the locale translations. 
Each of the gcalctool labels is currently localized. We would 
then adjust to use the × and ÷ characters in the .po files.

I presume we would also therefore need to add a en_US translation
in order to pick these up for U.S. folks.

I'm not in en_US, I'm in en_IE.  
I'd like to see this done once in such a way that it will work for "en" and wont
need to be repeated over and over for each "en_*" locale.  

Alan, if you can devise a solution that "just works" across
all locales, then I'll be happy to implement it. Toshi has
provided me with a solution using locale translations, and I
plan to test this tomorrow and check it in. This will include
a new en_US message file. I don't see an en_IE.po gcalctool
file at the moment, so use will have to use the US English
one (or one of the others when these two strings have been 
translated).

> Alan, if you can devise a solution that "just works" across

Please ignore my genaral rant on the crappy state of the internationalisation
infrastructure.  

Most likely I'll end up seeing the en-US strings anyway 
(I'd be surprised if gcalctool even needed en_GB let alone en_IE) 

I've checked the changes into CVS HEAD that should do this
and bumped the version number in configure.in to 5.5.19.
I've added in a .../po/en_US.po message file to.

Unfortunately, I can't get gcalctool to display the new
multiplication and division symbols on my machine. I am
running CDE rather than GNOME at the moment and perhaps
that's causing the problem.

You should be able to quickly test with:

% msgfmt -o gcalctool.mo en_US.po
% sudo mkdir -p $(prefix)/share/locale/en_US/LC_MESSAGES
% sudo cp gcalctool.mo $(prefix)/share/locale/en_US/LC_MESSAGES
% LC_ALL=en_US gcalctool

I've asked Toshi to try checking out this latest version 
and see if this works for him. I'll leave the bug open until
I get his feedback.

Seems having the × and ÷ strings in .../po/en_US.po 
broke the Ximian tinderbox build, so I've reverted 
them to * and / for now, until we can work out how
to really fix this bug.

Adding Toshi to the bug cc: list.

Yeah, these strings in the rev 1.1 were not encoded in UTF-8.

I've checked in corrected one to the HEAD.

If it was intltool that was causing the problems, be sure to add
"[encoding:UTF-8]" to po/POTFILES.in, and use UTF-8 in source code.

This would be better than using them only in en_US, since other translators
would be reminded that they can use them as well when they see them in original
messages :)

I counted 10 out of 60 translations to use "×" instead of "*" (grep -A1 'msgid
"\*"' *.po).

Toshi has checked in the correct encoding for those two strings
to .../po/en_US.po (thanks). Closing out as FIXED.