NESL RELEASE 3.1

BASIC INFORMATION:

NESL is a fine-grained, functional, nested data-parallel language.  The
current implementation runs on workstations, the Connection Machines
CM-2 and CM-5, Cray vector machines (Y-MP, J90, and C90), the MasPar,
and most machines supporting MPI.  NESL code is fully portable across
these machines, and for many applications it achieves performance
comparable to machine specific code.  The implementation is based on an
intermediate language called VCODE and a low-level vector library called
CVL.

HOW TO GET THE DISTRIBUTION:

The full NESL distribution can be obtained via anonymous FTP from:
	ftp://nesl.scandal.cs.cmu.edu/code/nesl/nesl.tar.Z
or	ftp://nesl.scandal.cs.cmu.edu/code/nesl/nesl.tar.gz

(If you have AFS, the release can also be obtained from:
	/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/scandal/public/code/nesl/nesl.tar.Z
or	/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/scandal/public/code/nesl/nesl.tar.gz

Once copied over to your machine, it can be unpacked by running:
	uncompress -c nesl.tar.Z | tar -xf -
or	gunzip -c nesl.tar.gz | tar -xf -

This will create a subdirectory called nesl in your current directory
with the full distribution within that directory.  To build NESL run
``make'' within the nesl directory (more details can be found in the
BUILD file).

REQUIREMENTS:

You will need either GNU, Allegro, CMU, or Lucid Common Lisp to run
NESL.  CMU and GNU Common Lisp are available for free.  See the FTP site
at ftp://ftp.ma.utexas.edu/pub/gcl/ for information on GCL, or email
slisp@cs.cmu.edu for information on CMU CL.  You will also need a
Unix-like operating system (SunOS, AIX, HP-UX, Ultrix, Mach and Unicos
work fine).

For the full NESL release you will also need a C compiler, lex, yacc,
and if you want the graphics routines, an X11 library.

DISTRIBUTION CONTENTS:

The current nesl distribution file (nesl.tar.Z) is approximately 1.3
Megabytes (compressed), and includes the following:

  BUILD           Directions on how to build NESL
  COPYRIGHT       Copyright information
  Makefile        Used for building the release
  README          This file
  bin/	         
    runnesl       The NESL executable
    vinterp.*     The VCODE interpreter, for various architectures
    xneslplot     X11 interface used for NESL graphics
    foreground.*  Scripts for executing VCODE from NESL in the foreground
    background.*  Scripts for executing VCODE from NESL in the foreground
  cvl/
    cm2/	  Source code for the CM-2 version of CVL
    cm5/	  Source code for the CM-5 version of CVL 
    cray/	  Source code for the CRAY version of CVL
    mpi/	  Source code for the MPI version of CVL
    serial/	  Source code for the serial version of CVL
  doc/		  
    cvl.ps	  The CVL manual
    manual.ps	  The NESL manual
    user.ps	  The NESL user's guide
    vcode-ref.ps  The VCODE manual
  emacs/          NESL editing mode for GNU Emacs
  examples/       Collection of NESL examples
  include/	  cvl.h include file
  lib/		  
    libcvl.a	  The CVL library
  neslseqsrc/     Source code for stand-alone NESL
  neslsrc/        Source code for NESL
  release.notes   List of changes since the last release
  utils/          Source code for xneslplot
  vcode/          Source code for the VCODE interpreter

The directory 
	ftp://nesl.scandal.cs.cmu.edu/code/nesl/nesl
contains the contents of the tar file if you are only interested in 
part of the distribution.

MAILING LIST:

To be added to the NESL mailing list, send e-mail to
nesl-request@cs.cmu.edu.

WEB PAGE:

The SCANDAL project web page is the main online source of information, at
	http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~scandal

BUGS:

Please send bug reports to nesl-bugs@cs.cmu.edu.  It should be noted
that NESL is a research tool rather than a production system.  We will
try to respond to your bugs as quickly as possible, but we can make no
guarantees.
