Bruce Merz asked in his message of 1995/05/16

First off, I was wondering whether Gap is available for Windows on a PC.
From what I can gather with our copy, obtained from
ftp://archives.math.utk.edu,it is simply EXECUTABLE from Windows. Is
this correct? If it is not available for Windows yet, when do the
creators think they will have it ready for Windows?

We distribute an executable for DOS. Like most well behaved DOS
programs, it does run under Windows, i.e., it is executable from Windows.
But it runs only in a DOS box of course, so it doesn't present nice
scrollbars, menues, and so on. Especially it does not offer the features
that XGAP offers X Windows users. Somebody here is working on a Windows
version, but it is too early to say when this will become available.

Bruce continued

My second question is very related. When executing 'gap.bat' from
Windows in the "gap3r4p1\bin" directory, gap compiles, but just before it
gives the "gap>" prompt, it gives the error message "Error, can't read
from "/RUN". What is "/RUN"? Is it something I should be worried about?
Do you know how I can fix the error?

Somebody (probably Windows) is passing this argument '/RUN' to the
script. The script passes it on to the GAP kernel. The GAP kernel then
interprets it as the name of a file it should read. Since no such file
exists, it tells you "Error, can't read from '/RUN'". So you see, no
need to worry. When you run GAP from within Windows, you should have
Windows directly call the executable ('gapdjg.exe'), not the script. You
must of course instruct Windows to pass the appropriate arguments
(e.g., '-l <libdir>' and '-m <memory>').

Bruce continued

One last question... When attempting to install Gap on our IBM-486
machine, with DOS 6.2 and Windows 3.1, the computer gave a message which
said that the CPU must be in REAL mode, and that extended memory
shouldn't be disabled. So I rebooted the machine and held SHIFT at the
appropriate time so that it wouldn't execute the AUTOEXEC.bat file. Then
Gap was installed without any problems. Further more, I can RUN Gap
without having to do the SHIFT trick. Can you tell me what was happening
there? Do I have an old version of Gap? It is Version 3.4.

This is not a problem with GAP, but with the 'unzoo' archive extactor.
It was compiled with an older version of the compiler. The DOS extender
that came with this older version could not handle some configurations.
It could for example be that you started your 'EMM' memory manager
(this is usually started in 'config.sys') with the 'NOEMS' switch.
Since you managed to install GAP, you shouldn't worry about that anymore.

Martin.

-- .- .-. - .. -.  .-.. --- ...- . ...  .- -. -. .. -.- .-
Martin Sch"onert,   Martin.Schoenert@Math.RWTH-Aachen.DE,   +49 241 804551
Lehrstuhl D f"ur Mathematik, Templergraben 64, RWTH, 52056 Aachen, Germany