Although, fortunately, GAP is not yet part of history, we have kept a few documents marking steps of its development. In particular, the prefaces of the manuals of the various releases sketch the respective progress. We present here links to (relevant extracts from) these prefaces as well as to some 'interim reports' that appeared in the GAP Forum. (For recent developments see the Release history.)
- Preface for GAP 2.4, the first publically released version of GAP (JN, December 1988)
- Preface for GAP 3.1 (JN, March 1991)
- From the preface for GAP 3.2 (JN, January 1993)
- Preface for GAP 3.4.3, the last GAP 3 release from Aachen (JN, June 1994)
- Interim Report GAP, 1997, me and all that (JN, June 1995)
- Interim Report Organizing GAP (JN, December 1995)
- Interim Report A European summer of CGT '97 (JN, July 1996)
- Interim Report WWW pages and refereeing (SL + JN, September 1996)
- From the preface for GAP 3.4.4 (SL, April 1997)
- Interim Report Move of GAP addresses (JN, June 1997)
- Forum letter Contributions to GAP (CW, July 1997)
- From the preface for GAP 4.B.1, the first beta release of GAP 4 (JN, July 1997)
- From the preface for GAP 4.1 (SL, July 1999)
- Preface for GAP 4.3 (SL, May 2002)
- Preface for GAP 4.4 (AH, March 2004)
- Preface for GAP 4.5 (June 2012)
Old Packages
No longer redistributed with GAP or renamed:
- Carat - this package has been renamed to CaratInterface.
- Citrus - this package has been renamed to Semigroups.
- Convex - this package has been superseded by NConvex.
- Gpd - this package has been renamed to groupoids.
- HAPprime - part of the code has been incorporated into the HAP package. Its source code repository, containing the code of the last distributed version, can still be found on GitHub here.
- if - this package has been withdrawn; a better functionality is now included in the newer package SCSCP.
- LAG - the functionality of this package is now included in the newer package LAGUNA.
- linboxing - this package does not compile for several years preceding GAP 4.10 release, and is unmaintained. It was therefore dropped from the GAP package distribution, but the latest sources are available here.
- MONOID - the functionality of this package is now included in the newer package Semigroups.
- NQL - this package has been withdrawn by the author, and later has been superseded by the package lpres.
- ParGAP - this package does not compile with GAP 4.9 (see this announcement). Its source code repository, containing the code of the last distributed version, plus some first fixes needed for compatibility for GAP 4.9, can still be found on GitHub here.
- PolymakeInterface - this package has been withdrawn.
- QaoS is no longer redistributed with GAP (see this announcement). Its source code repository, containing the code of the last distributed version, can still be found on GitHub here.
- recogbase - this package has been merged into the recog package, and therefore is no longer distributed with GAP.
Funding
We acknowledge with gratitude the support of the development of GAP ...- by the German Research Council (DFG) Collaborative Research Center TRR 195 "Symbolic Tools in Mathematics and their Application",
- by the EU Horizon 2020 European Research Infrastructure project 676541 "OpenDreamKit: Open Digital Research Environment Toolkit for the Advancement of Mathematics",
- by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Grant EP/M022641 "CoDiMa (CCP in the area of Computational Discrete Mathematics)",
- by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Grant EP/G055181 "HPC-GAP: High Performance Computational Algebra and Discrete Mathematics",
- as part of several projects within the DFG priority programme SPP 1489 (Algorithmic and Experimental Methods in Algebra, Geometry and Number Theory),
- by the EU Framework 6 project 26133 "SCIEnce: Symbolic Computation Infrastructure for Europe",
- by the National Science Foundation Grant DUE-0633333 "Enabling Computer Algebra Use in the Undergraduate Abstract Algebra Curriculum",
- by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Grant EP/C523229 "Multidisciplinary Critical Mass in Computational Algebra and Applications",
- by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Grant GR/S56085 "Semigroups and Monoids in GAP",
- by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Grant GR/R91298 "Computational Algebra for Commodity Parallel Machines",
- by grants of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in the framework of the Schwerpunkt "Algorithmen in Zahlentheorie und Algebra",
- by the EU Human Capital and Mobility Network, grant number ERBCHRXCT930418 "Computational Group Theory",
- by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Grant GR/L21013,
- by the Leverhulme trust grant F/268/Q,
- by the British Council and the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst under the ARC programme,
- and by the European Union's Esprit OpenMath project.