For the brave and adventurous...

[Richard B. Kreckel]

...there is some great new compiler food!  It's called GiNaC-0.8.0, it is
completely fat- and cholesterol-free and available at every good grocery
shop next to you.  For the not so brave and adventurous, Debian and RedHat
pre-cooked servings are expected to follow next week (well maybe).  Here
is the summary from the NEWS file:

* Complete revamp of indexed objects. Instead of multiple classes for
  indexed things and their indices there is now only one "indexed" class
  and two types of indices: "idx" for simple indices and "varidx" for
  indices with variance. There are predefined delta, epsilon and metric
  tensors, and a function simplify_indexed() that performs canonicalization
  and dummy index summations. Matrix objects can be indexed for doing simple
  linear algebra.
* Added an option "expand_indexed" to expand() to perform expansion of
  indexed objects like (a+b).i -> a.i + b.i
* Renamed get_indices() to get_free_indices(), which no longer returns
  dummy indices and checks the consistency of indices in sums.
* sqrfree() factorization fixed and improved syntactically.
* subs() works on matrices.
* Matrices can be constructed from flat list of elements; diagonal matrices
  can be constructed from list of diagonal elements with diag_matrix().
* Fixed memory leak in expand().
* Operator% for objects of class ncmul has gone.  Use operator* now for that
  case too, which is much more natural.

Happy hacking
          -richy.
-- 
Richard Kreckel
<Richard.Kreckel at Uni-Mainz.DE>
<http://wwwthep.physik.uni-mainz.de/~kreckel/>