<!-- HAPPRIME - intro.xml Introduction documentation section Paul Smith Copyright (C) 2007-2008 Paul Smith National University of Ireland Galway This file is part of HAPprime. HAPprime is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. HAPprime is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>. $Id: intro.xml 224 2008-03-04 12:09:42Z pas $ --> <!-- ********************************************************** --> <Chapter> <Heading>Introduction</Heading> <Section> <Heading>Introduction to the &HAPprime; package</Heading> &HAPprime; is a package for the &GAP; computer algebra system (<URL>http://www.gap-system.org/</URL>), and which extends the &HAP; `Homological Algebra Progamming' package written by Graham Ellis (<URL>http://hamilton.nuigalway.ie/Hap/www/</URL>). It provides algorithms and data structures for calculating cohomology ring presentations and resolutions of small prime-power groups. As well as new functions, &HAPprime; also provides some equivalents for some existing &HAP; functions that are much more memory-efficient and occasionally faster. <P/> In particular, the main reasons you may want to use &HAPprime; are <List> <Item>the calculation of resolutions of prime-power groups in &HAPprime; uses significantly less memory than the equivalent function in &HAP;, allowing resolutions (and cohomology ring presentations) of larger groups to be calculated (see Section <Ref Sect="ExResolution"/>);</Item> <Item>&HAPprime; can compute polynomial ring presentations for cohomology rings calculated using either &HAP; or &HAPprime; (see Section <Ref Sect="ExPresentation"/>);</Item> <Item>we provide a method which ensures that complete and correct cohomology rings are computed. This is a an implementation of Len Evens' original proof of the finite presentation of the cohomology rings (see Section <Ref Sect="ExPresentationLHS"/>).</Item> </List> </Section> <Section> <Heading>Required software</Heading> The &HAPprime; package requires &GAP; version 4.4 or greater and &HAP; version 1.8.9 or greater. For calculating provably-correct cohomology rings, the <Package>Singular</Package> commutative algebra system (<URL>http://www.singular.uni-kl.de/</URL>) and the <Package>singular</Package> &GAP; package are also required. </Section> <Section> <Heading>Installing &HAPprime;</Heading> To install the &HAPprime; Package, unpack the archive file into your &GAP; packages directory (either usually the <F>pkg</F> directory of your &GAP; 4 installation if you have access to it, or some local <F>pkg</F> directory that &GAP; can find). The &HAPprime; files will all be installed in a subdirectory called <F>happrime-<#Include SYSTEM "../../VERSION"></F>. </Section> <Section Label="LoadingAndTesting"> <Heading>Loading and testing &HAPprime;</Heading> The &HAPprime; package is not loaded by default when &GAP; is started. To load the package, type the following at the &GAP; prompt: <Log> gap> LoadPackage( "HAPprime"); </Log> If &HAPprime; isn't already in memory, it is loaded and the author information is displayed. If you are a frequent user of &HAPprime;, you might consider putting this line in your <F>.gaprc</F> file. <P/> The correct installation of &HAPprime; can be tested by using the test routine <F>tst/testall.g</F>: <Log> gap> ReadPackage("HAPprime", "tst/testall.g"); + HAPprime version <#Include SYSTEM "../../VERSION"> general tests + GAP4stones: 371057 + HAPprime version <#Include SYSTEM "../../VERSION"> userguide examples + GAP4stones: 387662 + HAPprime version <#Include SYSTEM "../../VERSION"> datatypes reference manual examples + GAP4stones: 382653 true </Log> The number of <C>GAP4stones</C> will vary depending on your machine, but any additional lines of messages indicate problems with your installation. <P/> The test routine calls a set of test files <Ref Sect="Test Files" BookName="ref"/> which can be found in the <F>tst</F> directory of the &HAPprime; installation. All of the routines listed in this user guide are tested, as are many of those in the datatype reference manual. </Section> <Section> <Heading>Documentation</Heading> The documentation for &HAPprime; is in two parts. This document is the user guide, which covers the main functions provided by &HAPprime; and examples of their use. There is also a more technical &HAPprime; datatypes reference manual which gives details of the new &GAP; datatypes defined and used internally by &HAPprime;, as well as outlining the algorithms used by the package. <#Include Label="MakeHAPprimeDoc_manMisc"> </Section> <Section> <Heading>Displaying progress and calculation information</Heading> By default, the functions in &HAPprime; display no output (except for returning the result). The <C>InfoHAPprime</C> info class can be used to enable the printing of progress and calculation information during processing. Since some computations with &HAPprime; can take several hours, setting this to a higher level can be particularly useful for monitoring the progress of computations. <#Include Label="InfoHAPprime_manMisc"> </Section> </Chapter>