Dear Dr. Aitchison, On Fri, Aug 05, 2005 at 11:59:26AM +0100, you wrote to the GAP Forum: > > I've been asked to install SPECHT, and hence GAP3. > Since GAP3 is no longer supported and we have been using GAP4 for years, > I'm reluctant to make GAP3 available again. I'm particularly worried > about people getting wrong answers from it, although I guess that in > many cases the result can be verified independently once found. > > My instinct is to point the user at a way of solving her problem > in GAP4 rather than enabling her to use GAP3. > > Comments ? > > -- > Dr. Andrew C. Aitchison Computer Officer, DPMMS, Cambridge > [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~werdna
I am afraid that, while generally GAP4 should be used, we can only recommend still to install GAP3 and its packages, if e.g. a user needs the functionality of SPECHT. SPECHT makes use of the large GAP3 package CHEVIE and both of them, as well as a few further ones have unfortunately not yet been tranferred to GAP4 by their authors. As you know, GAP is a project depending on the voluntary contributions of many people and this is in particular true for the 'packages' which remain fully under the control and responsibility of their individual authors. Although transfer of GAP3 code to GAP4 is strongly encouraged, the 'GAP team' (whatever that means), has no way of putting any pressure on these authors. As to reliability, from all we know, GAP3 was in a pretty good shape when further development of it was abundoned because of the shift to GAP4. And this shift was not done because of doubts in the reliability but in the hope that the new system GAP4 would offer more possibilities of extension, a hope that in our view has come true. So we hope that installing GAP3 now should not be a greater risk than at the time of the shift to GAP4. But (as with GAP4, after all) it is given away without any warranty. Hope that this information will help your decision. With kind regards Joachim Neubueser --------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof. em. J. Neubueser Lehrstuhl D fuer Mathematik RWTH Aachen Germany _______________________________________________ Forum mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gap-system.org/mailman/listinfo/forum
