Frequently Asked Questions

General Obtaining GAP Installation Hardware/OS Usage Complaints Computing with GAP Programming GAP

8. Programming GAP

8.3: Where is the GAP file editor? How do I save GAP programs?

GAP programs are simple text files, and you can edit them with any file editor. Under UNIX we would recommend vim, or emacs, for which special GAP modes are available, but pico, gedit and other programs also work fine. Under Windows we would recommend WordPad, or the cygwin ports of vim, pico or emacs, although there are undoubtedly other suitable editors. It is also possible to use a word processor, such as Microsoft Word, so long as you save as ASCII TEXT.

You can call GAP files anything you like, although we generally use names ending .g, .gap, .gd or .gi. It may help Windows users to give them names ending .txt. Once you have written your program, you can execute it using the Read() command in GAP. Note that within GAP the path separator character is always '/', so you might say:

gap> Read("d:/gapfiles/program.g");

D:\gapfiles\program.g.