From the Preface of GAP 3.4.4

Welcome to the first release of GAP from St Andrews. In the two years since the release of GAP 3.4.3, most of the efforts of the GAP team in Aachen have been devoted to the forth-coming major release, GAP 4.1, which will feature a re-engineered kernel with many extra facilities, a completely new scheme for structuring the library, many new and enhanced algorithms and algorithms for new structures such as algebras and semigroups.

While this was going on, however, our users were not idle, and a number of bugs and blemishes in the system were found, while a substantial number of new or improved share packages have been submitted and accepted. Once it was decided that the computational algebra group at St Andrews would take over GAP development, we agreed, as a learning exercise, to release a new upgrade of GAP 3.4, incorporating the bug fixes and new packages.

Assembling the release has indeed been a learning experience, and has, of course, taken much longer than we hoped. The release incorporates fixes to all known bugs in the library and kernel. In addition, there are two large new data libraries: of transitivie permutation groups up to degree 23; and of all groups of order up to 1000, except those of order 512 or 768 and some others have been extended. This release includes a number of share packages that are new since 3.4.3:

autag

for computing the automorphism groups of soluble groups;

CHEVIE

for computing with finite Coxteter groups, Hecke algebras, Chevalley groups and related structures, replacing 'weyl';

CrystGap

for computing with crystallographic groups;

glissando

for comnputing with near-rings and semigroups;

grim

for computing with rational and integer matrix groups;

kbmag

linking to Knuth-Bendix package for monoids and groups;

matrix

for analysing matrix groups over finite fields, replacing 'smash' and 'classic';

pcqa

linking to a polycyclic quotient program;

specht

for computing the representation theory of the symmetric group and related structures; and

xmod

for computing with crossed modules.

A number of other share packages have also been updated. Full details of all of these can be found in the updated manual, which is now also supplied in an HTML version.

Despite the tribulations of this release, we are looking forward to taking over a central role in GAP development in the future, and to working with the users and contributors who are so essential a part of making GAP what it is.

St Andrews, April 18, 1997, Steve Linton.

[In the manual for GAP 3.4.4 this was followed by a copy of the preface for GAP 3.4.3 in order to keep the continuity.]