What's new in release 3.0?

This page contains some informations about ACE release 3.0. Users already familiar with ACE may be interested in the differences between versions 2.0 and 3.0. New users of ACE may skip this part and proceed with the next pages. Many things have changed in ACE 3.0. In particular, names of functions have been normalized to be easily understood. New features of release 3.0 include:

New package PART: this package provides functions to work with partitions. Available functions deal with border, conjugate, diagonals, Frobenius notation, hooks, etc. of a partition, and also with lists of (skew) partitions.
New package COMP: it provides functions to work with compositions. Available functions deal with comparisons, major indexes, conjugates, lists of compositions.
New package FREE: This package provides functions to work with the free algebra, that is the algebra of words. It is also possible to work in the plactic monoid, i.e. the free algebra of words modulo the plactic relations.
New package SFA: this is an extension of the SYMF package which gives a way to handle symmetric functions viewed as operators acting on the ring of polynomials with real coefficients. It corresponds to an implementation of the Lambda-ring theory.
New possibilities in the SYMF package: it is from now possible to add new bases of the ring of symmetric functions, by the mean of two new functions SfAddBasis and SfDualBasis.
Many function names have been changed, many functions have disappeared, either becoming internal functions or being included as options of other more general ones. Function names have been strictly normalized.
New functions and algorithms have been included in already existing packages in order to improve their efficiency. This is in particular the case for the SG (symmetric group), the TAB (tableaux) and SYMF (symmetric functions) packages.
Heavy modifications in the coding of the elements of the different algebras implemented in ACE. Elements are now coded as sums of indexed names instead of sums of lists for some compatibility reasons with Maple V release 4.
Heavy internal modifications in the CG (classical groups) package have been performed in order to get it more efficient.
ACE installation has been completely rebuilt in order to use new possibilities with respect to the development of packages, in particular in Maple V release 4.
A test protocol has been included in ACE in order to have the possibility to test whether the installation has been successful or not. It corresponds to the automatic production of test files that you should read to test a specific package in ACE.
Removed package SHRI: this package has been removed from the ACE system.
Removed package FOCK: this package has been removed from the core of the ACE system. However, it is still available as a satellite package using ACE functionalities.
Some bugs have been fixed.
A new documentation is included in ACE 3.0, available both in postscript format and in the Html hypertext language.
The full system is available on Cd-Rom, including related papers (articles, theses), a mathematical manual explaining many algorithms used in ACE and how to experiment with ACE, the Html and postscript documentations. It also contains all sources, all installed (compiled) versions of ACE 3.0, together with the old versions of ACE.
ACE 3.0 is now available for Maple V release 5. Several changes have been made in the sources, in order to be compatible with this release of Maple. For instance, the infix operators for the Hecke algebra &%+, &%- and &%* have been replaced by &?+, &?- and &?*.