Dear GAP Forum members,

finally, there it is: a native Power Macintosh version of GAP. It is
about 8-10 times faster than the 68K version in emulation mode (we
got 58.000 GAPstones versus 6600 GAPstones on a PPC 6100/60), so
Power Macintosh users should upgrade in any case.

The GAP application and a version of unzoo are contained in the
self-extracting Stuffit Lite archive

bin3r4p2-mac-pt1.02-ppc.sea.bin

in the incoming directory of ftp.rwth-aachen.de. This archive is in
MacBinary II format (i.e. it must be downloaded in *binary* mode). If
you download this file directly to a Macintosh, you should obtain an
application directly. Otherwise, you must use a utility such as
Stuffit Lite or Stuffit Expander to decode MacBinary II.

The Mac-specific source files, which work both for the Symantec C
compiler and the CodeWarrior PPC compiler, are available as

src3r4p2-mac-pt1.02.sea.bin

at the same location as the application. Note that there has not been
a change in the GAP application in the update 3r4p2 -> 3r4p3 so that
GAP 3.4.2 is still up to date.

There is one minor difference between the native Power Mac version of
GAP 3.4.2 and the 68K Mac version: the default library path has been
changed from ':lib:' (Macintosh style path name) to 'lib/' (Unix
style path name), as has recently been suggested in the GAP forum.

Special thanks to Dirk Mattig (IWR Heidelberg, Germany), for letting
me use his Power Macintosh and CodeWarrior 7 C compiler, and for his
patience and excellent hospitality.

Please send remarks and bug reports specific to the Macintosh port
directly to Burkhard Hoefling <hoefling@mat.mathematik.uni-mainz.de>.

Have fun!

Burkhard.