GAP is distributed freely and all user support is done by the program authors in addition to their usual teaching and administrative duties and programming work. We try to answer requests as fast as possible, but depending on the work load or the difficulty of the question a response might take a week or two. 2. Obtaining GAP . You can download GAP here or use one of our ftp mirrors . We therefore do not normally produce CDs containing GAP .
ZIP is so much nicer.
The problem is that many Windows and Mac users do not have reliable tools to unpack gzipped tar archives, while we have a single source file that provides everyone with unzoo at the cost of one extra step. Another alternative is zip format, which, we are assured can handle text and binary nicely, and is now reliably available for UNIX, Windows and MacOS, however it doesn't seem to offer enough advantage over our present arrangements to justify the effort of changing at the moment. While it is good to be familiar with the standard method of installing programs on your machine, the installation of GAP might differ substantially from what you are accustomed to. Please get the documentation for the system you are using and follow the steps described there. Once you have unpacked GAP you will find the documentation inside the doc subdirectory.