GiNaCWe are pleased to announce the first public prerelease (V0.4) of GiNaC. GiNaC, which stands for GiNaC is Not a CAS (Computer Algebra System), is a library for C++, designed to allow the creation of integrated systems that embed symbolic manipulations together with more established areas of computer science (like computation-intense numeric applications, graphical interfaces, etc.) under one roof. It has been specifically developed to become a replacement engine for the high energy physics (HEP) program xloops which is up to now powered by MapleV. However, it is not restricted to HEP applications. Its design is unconventional in a sense that contrary to ordinary CAS it does not try to provide sophisticated algebra in a rather limited programming language but instead accepts a given language (ANSI-C++) and extends it by a set of symbolic/algebraic capabilities. It is accompanied by the tiny GiNaC INteractive SHell (ginsh), a powerful command-line calculator for Unix that supports arbitrary precision calculations, differentiation of functions, computations of multivariate polynomial GCD and much more without having to actually program in C++. It is licensed under the terms and conditions of the GNU general public license (GPL). The web-site contains download-instructions, a system overview and a tutorial.
Richard Kreckel
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