Dear GAP Forum,

Andreas Hoppe asked:
> what is the actual definition of a GAPstone? I guess the number is
> milliseconds for a certain bit of GAP code - but which?

The file is 'tst/combinat.tst' in the standard GAP distribution.
It outputs a GAPstone number. (This number is not directly milliseconds,
but scaled such that an Atari ST running GAP 3.1 yielded 1000 GAPstones).
Incidentally, for PCs with a Pentium processor running under Unix, the
number of kiloGAPstones is roughly the Processor speed in MHz. On current
day top-level systems (DEC Alpha, Pentium Pro) you get something around
300k-330k GAPstones.
The GAPstone ranking basically reflects the speed of memory operations and
integer arithmetic.

Best,

Alexander Hulpke