FORM

Contents

Short Description

FORM is a computer program for manipulating very large formulae. It is devoted to

Current Version and Licensing Possibilities

The current version is FORM 2. The exact version number is 2.3, indicating that minor improvements have been made since release 2.0.

FORM runs on many computers of different type, from Atari or PC to mainframes. The release date of the first version was 1989. This version is available by anonymous ftp from nikhefh.nikhef.nl. The second enhanced version is commercial, was released 1991, and is distributed by

CAN Diensten
Kruislaan 419
1098 VA Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Email: form@can.nl
Fax: (31)-20-5608448
Phone: (31)-20-5608400
http://www.candiensten.nl

Check the website from the CAN Diensten for details about pricing and licensing.

Long Description

General Description

FORM is a computer program for manipulating very large formulae. Other programs will only manipulate formulae as long as the entire formulae can be stored inside the computer, and these programs stop or become very slow when the memory limit is reached. Due to a different operational structure FORM can use the entire available diskspace for its expressions, without any significant loss in speed. So, FORM can deal with formulae of virtually infinite size. The only drawback of this freedom in expression size is that the set of instructions in FORM is somewhat limited and that not many ready made solutions are offered, even though it is possible to construct standard routines in the language of FORM. On the one hand this is due to the young age of FORM, and the future will see rather sophisticated special purpose packages (some are available already. They can be obtained by anonymous ftp from the computer called ftp.nikhef.nl, where you can also obtain version 1 of FORM). The other consideration that is a point against ready made solutions is that large problems often ask for an efficient programming of a special case, just to make them solvable. Hence the main field of application. of FORM is frontier line research that cannot wait 5 (or more) years until the speed of computers is sufficient to run the current problems with (admittedly easier to program) computer algebra systems like Reduce, Maple or Mathematica. In short, FORM is devoted to
FORM Home Page.


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Last updated: April 14,1998