Bruce Kaskell writes in his e-mail of 24-Mar-93
I've recently been trying to install GAP on my PC (486).
I've set up the gapexe.386 executable and the \lib and \grp libraries.

Hopefully someone out there has been through this and can answer some
questions

1) I have not been able to correctly access the grp library.
I do not get an error message but the machine simply 'freezes'.
For example, I type 'SymmetricGroup(3);' at the 'gap>' prompt
and nothing happens.

Martin Sch"onert advised me to remove my TSR's and EMM386. I tried this
and a variety of other combinations but it's still no good.

Can anyone point out what I might be doing wrong?

I am sorry, I misunderstood your e-mail. When you wrote that you ``could
not use any of the *group functions*'', I interpreted that as ``could not
use any of the *library functions*''.

You should write the library path in your batch file that starts GAP
using slashes '/' instead of backslashes '\'. This is because
'lib/init.g' computes the group path by replacing 'lib/' in 'LIBNAME' by
'grp/'. In any case, start GAP and look at the variables 'LIBNAME' and
'GRPNAME' to see that they make sense.

But why would GAP freeze if the 'GRPNAME' is wrong? If I try it here,
I just get an error message.

Bruce Kaskel continues:

2) I am currently just trying to get the gapexe.386 port running.
However since I am putting it on a 486 I wonder:
I assume that gapexe.386 was compiled with 387 emmulation.
Is this correct?
If so, how much 'speed improvement'/'program size savings' is achieved
by compiling for a 387?

GAP doesn't use any floating point. So there will be no speed
improvement. One probably could use a version of 'go32' (the DOS
extender) without floating point emulation, but I doubt that the gain in
program size is worth the effort.

Martin.

-- .- .-. - .. -.  .-.. --- ...- . ...  .- -. -. .. -.- .-
Martin Sch"onert,   Martin.Schoenert@Math.RWTH-Aachen.DE,  +49 241 804551
Lehrstuhl D f"ur Mathematik, Templergraben 64, RWTH, D 51 Aachen, Germany