Welcome to Kenzo

According to the title of its handbook, Kenzo is a "Symbolic Software for Effective Homology Computation" and its main audience might be students and researchers in algebraic topology. Have a look at the overview to get a sense for what's there for you to discover.

This repository contains a repackaged version of the Kenzo program by Francis Sergeraert and collaborators. The original version of the program can be found at http://www-fourier.ujf-grenoble.fr/~sergerar/Kenzo/ . This version aims to update its infrastructure by providing the following:

1. A simple regression test suite based on FiveAM
2. Support for the great freely available Lisp compilers out there, including CCL, [ECL] (https://common-lisp.net/project/ecl/), SBCL, etc.
3. Installation via the Quicklisp library manager
4. Updated documentation and examples runnable from cl-jupyter

This work is well underway, but there are several outstanding issues.

Getting up and running

There are several methods to get going:

1. Just play with it a little! (Live)
2. Just give me a Docker container!
3. Local installation via Quicklisp or ASDF

Plain ASDF

To load Kenzo as provided by this repo, make sure ASDF knowns where to find the source, e.g. by creating a link to this directory at

  ~/.local/share/common-lisp/source/

Then in your Lisp (e.g., in ECL) type

(require :asdf)
(require :kenzo)

Quicklisp

Assuming you have Quicklisp, there isn't really much to say here:

* (ql:quickload :kenzo)
To load "kenzo":
  Install 1 Quicklisp release:
    kenzo
; Fetching #<URL "http://beta.quicklisp.org/archive/kenzo/2015-08-04/kenzo-20150804-git.tgz">
; 1835.57KB
==================================================
1,879,625 bytes in 1.48 seconds (1236.91KB/sec)
; Loading "kenzo"
[package cat].....................................
..................................................
..............................
(:KENZO)
*

Similarly, you'd load Kenzo via (ql:quickload :kenzo).

Three Kenzo versions for the price of one (free!)

This release contains three Kenzo versions 1.1.[7,8,9]. For backward compatibility, the default version is still 1.1.7. There are separate packages cat-[7,8,9] for the different versions and cat and kenzo are package nicknames for cat-7:

* (ql:quickload :kenzo)
To load "kenzo":
  Load 1 ASDF system:
    kenzo
; Loading "kenzo"

(:KENZO)
* (in-package :cat)
#<PACKAGE "CAT-7">
* (kenzo-version)

*** Kenzo-Version 1.1.7 ***

* (in-package :kenzo)
#<PACKAGE "CAT-7">
* (kenzo-version)

*** Kenzo-Version 1.1.7 ***
*

You can change that, for example, by RENAME-PACKAGE or USE-PACKAGE:

* (ql:quickload :kenzo)
To load "kenzo":
  Load 1 ASDF system:
    kenzo
; Loading "kenzo"

(:KENZO)
* (rename-package 'cat-7 'cat-old)
#<PACKAGE "CAT-OLD">
* (rename-package 'cat-9 'cat-new '(cat kenzo))
#<PACKAGE "CAT-NEW">
* (cat:kenzo-version)

*** Kenzo-Version 9 ***
*