CharSets is a program which I translated from the Maple package CharSets,
written by Dr. Dongming Wang.  His homepage is  http://calfor.lip6.fr/~wang.
A good reference for Characteristic sets is his book Elimination Methods.

I wish to thank Dr. Wang for making this code available to the maxima
project.  I also wish to thank Dr. Willis, Dr. Fateman and Mr. Dotson for
their assistance with this project.
Finally, I wish to dedicate this work to the late Dr. Paul Karmel.
Dan Stanger
11/28/02

The CharSets package depends on the set functions in set.lisp, which was
previously in maxima/src/ and is now in maxima/share/algebra/charsets/.
To use CharSets, set.lisp must be loaded first, as it is no longer part
of the compiled Maxima code. For general use, nset.lisp in
maxima/share/contrib/nset/ supersedes set.lisp.

Robert Dodier
2005/02/07

src/flatten.lisp has also been moved to share/algebra/charsets/,
with $every cut from src/mutils.lisp and pasted into flatten.lisp.
$flatten and $every have been renamed to $charsets_flatten and 
$charsets_every, and every function in set.lisp has been renamed
from $foo to $charsets_foo. Function calls in charsets.mac and
rtestflatten.mac have been fixed up from foo to charsets_foo to
match set.lisp and flatten.lisp.

Robert Dodier
2005/02/23
