                    =====================================
                      Package "Bit::Vector" Version 6.3
                    =====================================


                 Copyright (c) 1995 - 2002 by Steffen Beyer.
                             All rights reserved.


Credits:
--------

Many thanks to Andreas Koenig <upload@franz.ww.tu-berlin.de> for his
efforts as upload-manager for the CPAN, his patience, and lots of good
advice and suggestions! Thank you for doing such a tremendous (and time-
consuming) job!!

Also many thanks to David Jenkins <jenkins@sdm.de> for reviewing the
first version of the README file and the man page.

Many thanks to Jarkko Hietaniemi <Jarkko.Hietaniemi@hut.fi> for his
suggestions while I was developing the first release of this package!

Many thanks also to the people of the perl5-porters <perl5-porters@nicoh.com>
mailing list, specifically:

Andreas Koenig <andreas.koenig@mind.de>
Tim Bunce <Tim.Bunce@ig.co.uk>
Jarkko Hietaniemi <Jarkko.Hietaniemi@hut.fi>
Felix Gallo <fsg@coriolan.amicus.com>
Mark A Biggar <mab@wdl.loral.com>
Nick Ing-Simmons <nik@tiuk.ti.com>
John Macdonald <jmm@elegant.com>

for discussing and clarifying the naming and other issues of this package!

Also many thanks to David Thompson <dlt@dewey.csun.edu> for reporting a
problem he encountered concerning the inclusion of the Perl distribution
("Unable to find include file ...") and for suggesting a solution for this
problem. (That's the most pleasant kind of problem report, of course! ;-) )

Many thanks to Rob Johnson <rjohnson@apple.com> for an improved algorithm
for computing binomials with always integer intermediate results (and
numbers never getting too big)!

Thanks to Banchong Harangsri <bjtong@cse.unsw.edu.au> for reporting the
problem of the version 1.1 of this module with Perl 5.002!

Special thanks to Dean Roehrich <roehrich@cray.com> for his assistance
in trying to find the cause of and a remedy for the above problem!

Many thanks to Andreas Koenig for notifying me of the alternative for the
directory structure using the "lib" subdirectory and a way to use "confess"
in an XSUB via "perl_eval_sv".

Many special thanks to Larry Schwimmer <rosebud@cyclone.stanford.edu> for
reporting the bug related to 64 bit machines and finding where an implicit
assumption of 32 bit integers was hidden, and for testing the new version
on his machine!

Many thanks to Ralf S. Engelschall <rse@engelschall.com> for suggesting
the four new methods "Size()", "Empty_Interval()", "Fill_Interval()" and
"Flip_Interval()", implemented in version 3.0 of the "Set::IntegerFast"
module (and also in the "Set::IntegerRange" module)!

Also many thanks to Ralf Engelschall for the many good suggestions that
went into version 4.0 of this package (concerning many different aspects)!

Many thanks to Stas Bekman <sbekman@iil.intel.com> for raising the question
of bitwise shift and rotation operations in Perl, which gave me the idea to
implement such shift registers with arbitrary size, which in turn and with
time gave me the idea of implementing a "Bit::Vector" base class capable of
this along with already existing functionality (for sets and boolean matrices).

Also many thanks to Jon Orwant <orwant@media.mit.edu> and Tim Bunce
<Tim.Bunce@ig.co.uk> for their suggestions and comments concerning my
first attempts at writing a module for bitwise shift and rotate operations
in Perl, which eventually went into version 4.0 of this module!

Many thanks to Brian S. Julin <bri@calyx.net> for sharing his ideas, his
questions and the code of his "Bit::File" module with me, which inspired
me to write the routines to access arbitrary chunks of bits.

Many thanks to Hau-Yung Chen <hchen@oda-tech.com> for suggesting the
string conversion routines to convert to/from binary representation
and the possibility to concatenate bit vectors.

Many thanks to Jarkko Hietaniemi <Jarkko.Hietaniemi@hut.fi> for suggesting
the implementation of the transpose of a matrix in C for better performance.
The transpose can be used in finding the strongly connected components of
a graph.

Many thanks go to Daniel Koch <dkoch@amcity.com> for suggesting the
"Index_List_Store()" and "Index_List_Read()" methods!

Many thanks again to Hau-Yung Chen <hchen@oda-tech.com> for suggesting
a way for speeding up the conversion to decimal in "to_Dec()" (by dividing
the bit vector through the largest possible power of ten that will fit into
a machine word and then breaking down the rest using only machine words,
which is faster than repeatedly dividing the whole bit vector by ten).
According to my measurements, this resulted in an 8-fold speed increase.

Many thanks go to Krzysztof Koczyjan <krzysztofk@rocketmail.com> for
suggesting and extensively benchmarking a more efficient method for
bit counting in the method "Norm()", which was adopted in version 5.2.

Many thanks again to Krzysztof Koczyjan <krzysztofk@rocketmail.com> for
an additional improvement of the method "Norm()", which was adopted in
version 5.3.

Many thanks to Bryan Bayerdorffer <bryan.bayerdorffer@analog.com> for
notifying me of the bug in the "Divide()" method, which was immediately
fixed in version 5.4.

Many thanks to Rob W. Koeling <koeling@let.rug.nl> for reporting and to
Paul J. Schinder <schinder@pobox.com> for reporting and helping to investigate
the error of the failed tests 96-131 of test script "t/01________new.t" under
HP-UX 10! This was fixed in version 5.5.

Many thanks to the "CPAN testers" (http://www.connect.net/gbarr/cpan-test/)
in general and to Jarkko Hietaniemi <jhi@iki.fi> in particular for testing
this module and for reporting the compiler warning which occurred on line
2067 of "BitVector.c" with the native "cc" compiler under Digital Unix,
which has been fixed in version 5.6.

Also many thanks to Matt Knecht <hex@voicenet.com> for pushing me hard
enough ;-) to suppress those annoying leading zeros in the output from
"to_Hex()" in version 5.6!

Many thanks to Roland Titze <Roland.Titze@ks.sel.alcatel.de> and
to Andrew Brown <alloneword@dial.pipex.com> for pointing out the
misspelling of "whether" (was: wether) throughout my documentation,
corrected in version 5.8.

Thanks also go to Steve Tolkin <steve.tolkin@fmr.com> for suggesting that
I should emphasize in the README.txt file that the reading of the INSTALL.txt
file is important, especially if running Perl under Windows. :-)

Many special thanks to Joshua N. Pritikin <joshua.pritikin@db.com> for
sending in valuable patches to make this module ready for Perl 5.6.0
and to optimize the "strEQ" away from the typemap section in Vector.xs.

Lots of thanks also to Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes <sthoenna@efn.org> for
sending in a patch to make this module ready for Perl 5.6.0 and for
extremely useful hints (and a patch) as to why the test suite had
failures with Perl 5.6.0 all of a sudden.

Many thanks to John Peacock <jpeacock@rowman.com> for reporting a
problem with the VMS linker which is unable to differentiate case -
in violation of the ANSI C standard - and for sending a patch to fix
this problem.

Many thanks to Tom Oelke <toelke@mipos2.intel.com> for reporting a
problem with test "t/01________new.t" when Perl was built to use
64 bit integers and for suggesting two possible fixes. The second
one (adding "use integer;" at the top of the script) was adopted
in version 6.2.

Many thanks to Clint Olsen <clint@0lsen.net> for his many interesting
questions and suggestions, one of which led to my writing the new
example file "examples/test.c" in version 6.2.

Many thanks to Tels <tels@bloodgate.com> for his criticism of "GCD()"
and the documentation (with respect to common method name aliases
such as Or, And, Xor, etc.). Both weaknesses have been fixed in
version 6.2.

Many thanks to Mike Swieton <swietonm@student.gvsu.edu> (and many other
people in the past) for sending in a patch so that ToolBox.h will compile
with C++ compilers.


