Polymake.jl 0.2.0 released

This is a technical release focused on bringing more functionality to Julia. With Polymake-v0.2.0 we require polymake-3.5.

The main change is the addition of the @pm macro. This macro is the swiss army knife of calls to polymake library (it transforms julia-like syntax to low-level calls to polymake). Therefore nearly all functionality of polymake is now accessible in Polymake.jl in one form or another.

Summary of new features

• All user functions from perl/polymake are available in the appropriate modules, e.g. homology function from topaz can be called as Topaz.homology(…) in julia. ?Topaz.homology brings polymake docstring.
• Most of the user functions from polymake are available as Appname.funcname(...) in Polymake.jl. However, any function from polymake C++ library can be called via @pm Appname.funcname(…)` macro.
• All big objects of perl/polymake can be constructed via @pm macro. For example

  @pm Tropical.Polytope{Max, QuadraticExtension}(:POINTS=>[1 0 0; 1 1 0; 1 1 1])
  

• Properties of polymake big objects are accessible by bigobject.property syntax (as opposed to $bigobject->property in polymake). If there is a missing property (e.g. Polytope.Polytope does not have DIM property in Polymake.jl), please check if it can be accessed by Appname.property(object). For example property DIM is exposed as Polytope.dim(...) function.
• Methods are available as functions in the appropriate modules, with the first argument as the object, i.e. $bigobj->methodname(...) can be called via Appname.methodname(bigobj, …)
• A function in Polymake.jl calling polymake may return a big or small object, and the generic return (PropertyValue) is transparently converted to one of the native data types (below). If you really care about performance, this conversion can be deactivated by adding keep_PropertyValue=true keyword argument to function/method call.
• polymake data structures can be converted to appropriate julia types, but are also subtypes of the corresponding julia abstract types, e.g., a pm_Vector is an AbstractVector, and one can call methods that apply to AbstractVectors on polymake arrays. The list of available wrapped data structures includes:
• pm_Integer <: Integer,
• pm_Rational <: Real,
• pm_Vector <: AbstractVector,
• pm_Matrix <: AbstractMatrix,
• pm_Array <: AbstractVector (it’s a container type without arithmetic),
• pm_Set <: AbstractSet. Some combinations thereof are available as well, e.g., Sets of Arrays of Integers.

Happy polymaking!