Using GP under [*].

Thanks to the help of Annette Hoffman from the university of Saarbrücken, and since version 1.34.05 from David Carlisle from the university of Manchester, it is possible and in fact desirable to use GP as a subprocess of gnuemacs. This is of course possible only if gnuemacs has been installed on your machine.

To use this, you must include in your .emacs file the following line:

(load "[*]" nil t)

where pari.el is the name of the file that will have to be loaded by gnuemacs (if you have changed the name, or if you have the file in a different directory, you must of course supply the correct name). This file is included in the PARI distribution.

Once this is done, under gnuemacs if you type M-x gp (where as usual M is the Meta key, i.e. Escape, or on SUN keyboards, the Left key), a special shell will be started, which in particular launches GP with the default stack size, prime limit and input buffer size. If you type instead C-u M-x gp, you will be asked for the name of the GP executable, the stack size, the prime limit and the input buffer size before the execution of GP begins. If for any of these you simply type return, the default value will be used (on Unix machines it will be /usr/local/bin/gp for the executable, 4000000 for the stack, 500000 for the prime limit and 30000 for the buffer size).

You can then work as usual under GP, but with two notable advantages. First and foremost, you have at your disposal all the facilities of a text editor like emacs, in particular for correcting or copying blocks. Second, you can have an on-line help which is much more complete than what you obtain by typing ?name. This is done by typing M-? (where M is the Meta key). In the minibuffer, emacs asks what function you want to describe, and after your reply you obtain the description which is in the users manual, including the description of functions (such as \, %) which use special symbols.

This help system can also be menu-driven, by using the command M-\c which opens a help menu window which enables you to choose the category of commands for which you want an explanation.

You also have at your disposal a few other commands. Read the file pari.txt for details.

Note that if for some reason the session crashes (due to a bug in your program or in the PARI system), you will usually stay under emacs, but the GP buffer will be killed. To recover it, simply type again M-x gp (or C-u M-x gp), and a new session of GP will be started after the old one, so you can recover what you have typed. Note that this will of course not work if for some reason you exited emacs before coming back (except for the C-z temporary stopping command).