FORM

FORM is a symbolic manipulation program that is eminently suited for large problems in mathematics, physics and engeneering. The size of the formulae that it can manipulate is virtually unlimited: the major limitation is usually the size of the available disk space. It has been designed for speed so that large expressions may be dealt with in a finite amount of time. Overflowing the available amounts of physical memory results in only a minor slow down as the disk memory is managed by FORM itself rather than by the virtual memory manager of the computer (the memory management can slow down a computer algebra system enormously when expressions become large).

FORM is equipped with a set of basic commands that allow the user to construct his own composite commands. Very little `ready knowledge' has been built in. When comparing FORM to the popular computer algebra systems Maple, Reduce, Mathematica and Macsyma would be something like LISP or prolog and FORM would be something in the class of C: very versatile and powerful but you have to make everything yourself.

FORM has been made by Jos Vermaseren so if you find any bugs in it you should mail these to him at t68@nikhefh.nikhef.nl . If you use FORM for a scientific publication it would be very nice to refer to it and send a copy of the reprint to 

    J.Vermaseren
    NIKHEF-H
    P.O.Box 41882
    1009DB Amsterdam
    The Netherlands

Version 1.1 for Linux (a.out-binary) can be obtained at ftp://hep.itp.tuwien.ac.at/pub/Form.

The benchmark test file 'bench1' takes
13.0 sec on a 586/133 under DOS
2.2 sec on the tph16 under HP-UX.
2.2 sec on a 586/133 under Linux
1.1 sec on a 686/200 under Linux

Anton Rebhan <rebhana@tph.tuwien.ac.at>
Page last modified: 1999/1/28