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# 1 About Programming in GAP

This is one of four parts of the GAP documentation, the others being the GAP Tutorial, a beginner's introduction to GAP, the GAP Reference Manual, which contains the official definitions of GAP, and Extending GAP, which explains how to create files and functions that will work together with mechanisms built in GAP, how to write documentation, and so on.

This manual is divided into chapters. Each chapter is divided into sections, and within each section, important definitions are numbered. References therefore are triples.

The chapters Method Selection and Creating New Objects of this manual describe how the knowledge about GAP objects is used by the system, via the so-called method selection mechanism, and how such knowledge resp. objects with such knowledge can be created.

Chapter Examples of Extending the System gives some simple examples of how to add new functionality to the system.

A more involved example for the design of new GAP objects can be found in Chapter An Example -- Residue Class Rings. In particular, see Sections A First Attempt to Implement Elements of Residue Class Rings and Why Proceed in a Different Way? for finding out whether this manual is useful for you at all. One more example is discussed in Chapter An Example -- Designing Arithmetic Operations.

Pages are numbered consecutively in each of the four manuals. For manual conventions, see Section Manual Conventions in the Reference Manual.

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GAP 4 manual
May 2002