FORM is a Symbolic Manipulation System. It reads symbolic expressions from files and executes symbolic/algebraic transformations upon them. The answers are returned in a textual mathematical representation. As its landmark feature, the size of the considered expressions in FORM is only limited by the available disk space and not by the available RAM.
FORM's original author is Jos Vermaseren of NIKHEF, the Dutch institute for subatomic physics. Other people that have made contributions can be found in the file "AUTHORS".
Before building FORM, it is advised to install the optional dependencies gmp
and zlib for better performance. To quickly build FORM, install the autoconf
and automake packages. Then, after cloning the repository, run:
autoreconf -i
./configure
make
make install
For more advanced build options, see the file "INSTALL".
Information about copying and licencing of this software can be found in the file "COPYING".
More background information a collection of FORM programs a number of courses and an online version of the manual can be found on the official FORM website: http://www.nikhef.nl/~form.
Bugs can be reported via the Issue Tracker of Github.
The issue tracker can also be used for questions, remarks and suggestions. In the past the FORM forum was used for this but we will discontinue the forum in the future.