ftp.nice.ch/pub/next/unix/science/pari.1.39.README

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pari-1.39.README
April 1996

This archive contains an Installer.app package for pari-1.39.  I built a
(quad-FAT) portable c++ version first, then built an optimized assembly 
i386 version, and lipo'd in the faster (about 15%-40% faster) i386 into 
the FAT binary gp.

Initial tests (tested only on m68k and i386) show the i386 version (both c++
and assembly) to be relatively stable, whereas the m68k version is not as so.
Your mileage may vary...

From the PARI manual, Introduction:

The PARI system is a package which is capable of doing formal computations on recursive types at high speed; it is primarily aimed at number theorists, but can be used by people who primary need is speed.

Although quite an amount of symbolic manipulation is possible in PARI, this
system does very badly compared to much more sophisticated systems like
Axiom, Macsyma, Magma, Maple, Mathematica or Reduce on such
manipulations (e.g. multivariate polynomials, formal integration, etc...). 
On the other hand, the two main advantages of the system are its speed 
(which can be between 5 and 100 times better on many computations than 
the above mentioned systems), and the possibility of using directly data 
types which are familiar to mathematicians.

  1) as a library, which can be called from any upper-level language
application (for instance written in C, C++, Pascal or Fortran);

  2) as a sophisticated programmable calculator, named GP, which
contains most of the standard control instructions of a standard language
like C.


CREDITS:

Rex Dieter <rdieter@math.unl.edu>
Computer System Manager
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
http://www.math.unl.edu/~rdieter/

Source Code
ftp://megrez.math.u-bordeaux.fr/

These are the contents of the former NiCE NeXT User Group NeXTSTEP/OpenStep software archive, currently hosted by Netfuture.ch.