January 16, 1995


	Announcement of the Pari-1.39 release


This message is to announce the official release of version 1.39 of 
the PARI/GP system. For the moment, only available on
megrez.math.u-bordeaux.fr, but soon also available at other sites near
you such as math.ucla.edu.

For those who do not yet know, PARI/GP is a package which is
aimed at efficient computations in number theory, but also contains
a large number of functions unrelated to number theory. It is somewhat
related to a Computer Algebra System, but is not really one since
it treats symbolic expressions as mathematical entities such as polynomials,
series, matrices, etc..., and not as expressions per se. However it is
often much faster than other CAS, and contains a huge number of specific
functions not found elsewhere, essentially for use in number theory.
In particular, and especially so in the present release, there is a very
large package for working in general algebraic number fields.

In addition, it is free!

For users of previous releases of Pari, at least previous to 1.38.7,
we urge you to upgrade. Not only for the increased functionalities,
but also because of two nasty bugs in the kernel. The first one was
announced on the net almost a year ago, and was discovered by Bill
Dubuque. The second, less serious, is very analogous to the Pentium
FDIV bug in that it affects the least significant digits of floating
point division in extremely rare circumstances. However, this last
bug caused an error message on all but the MC680x0 implementations,
so the results produced were never wrong except perhaps on MC680x0
machines (not Motorola's fault of course! -:).

Some compiled binaries for Sparc versions 7 and 8, DEC Alpha, and
HP-PA are available, and in a few days a Mac version (both 68K
and native PowerPC) also. We hope soon to have Intel 386 and above
versions available under Linux, MSDOS and OS/2, however we do not
support those versions because we do not have any Intel machines.

For all questions related to Pari itself, mail to
pari@math.u-bordeaux.fr
URL: 	ftp://megrez.math.u-bordeaux.fr/pub/pari

For the Mac versions of Pari, mail to
bernardi@mathp6.jussieu.fr
URL:	ftp://hensel.mathp6.jussieu.fr/dist/pari