…you might want to read up on some things that are important for backward compatibility.
polymake always was a hybrid system written half in C++, half in Perl, but it is only now that the user can directly take advantage of C++ data types and interfaces in Perl. For instance, via the interface to GMP polymake can also become your favorite programmable pocket calculator:
> $f = new Integer(1); > for (my $i = new Integer(100); $i>0; --$i) { $f *= $i; } > print $f; 93326215443944152681699238856266700490715968264381621468592963895217599993229915608941463976156518286253697920827223758251185210916864000000000000000000000000
The input of large integer and rational numbers was kind of subtle in the past, but now (since version 2.11) it has become quite intuitive:
> $bignum=93326215443944152681699238856266700490715968264381621468592963895217599993229915608941463976156518286253697920827223758251185210916864000000000000000000000000; > print $bignum; 93326215443944152681699238856266700490715968264381621468592963895217599993229915608941463976156518286253697920827223758251185210916864000000000000000000000000 > $ratnum=123456/789012; > print $ratnum; 10288/65751
Each integer constant being too large to fit into a normal perl scalar value is automatically converted to an Integer object; each fraction of two integer constants is automatically converted to a Rational object (and canonicalized, as can be seen in the example above).
Suppose you still have a file cube.poly, e.g., from trying out the tutorial of a previous version. You can still do
polymake cube.poly N_FACETS N_FACETS 6
from the command line as you used to. This is the backward compatibility mode. While this may give the impression that nothing changed and that you do not have to adapt to the new, this is plain wrong. There are two things to keep in mind: 1. The old stand-alone clients (such as cube, e.g.) are gone. 2. Once you used the next generation polymake on your old files they will be transformed into XML (keeping all your data). In particular, once you called the next generation polymake on your files you will not be able to use any old version on them later.
Equivalent to calling “cube c3.poly 3” as before would now be:
polymake 'save(cube(3),"c3.poly")'
A word of warning: It was rarely legal but always popular to edit files that polymake worked on with an ASCII text processor. This is still possible (if you know what you are doing), but in addition to the caveats previously in place (which are still valid) you have to pay attention to producing valid XML.