changes, 1.24.05

packages that have been published and certified:
- CotangentSchubert, a package by Paul Zinn-Justin for Cotangent Schubert calculus, has been published.
- GeometricDecomposability, a package by Mike Cummings and Adam Van Tuyl to check whether ideals are geometrically vertex decomposable, has been published.
- InvariantRing, a package by Luigi Ferraro, Federico Galetto, Francesca Gandini, Hang Huang, Thomas Hawes, Matthew Mastroeni, and Xianglong Ni for invariants of group actions, has been published.
- MultiplicitySequence, a package by Justin Chen, Youngsu Kim, and Jonathan Montaño for computing the multiplicity sequence of an ideal, has been published.
- Probability, a package by Doug Torrance for basic probability functions, has been published.
- TropicalToric, a package by Alessio Borzì on tropical methods for toric intersection theory, has been published.
new packages:
- MultigradedBGG, a package by Maya Banks, Michael K. Brown, Tara Gomes, Prashanth Sridhar, Eduardo Torres Davila, and Sasha Zotine for the multigraded BGG correspondence and differential modules, has been added.
- TropicalToric, a package by Alessio Borzì on tropical methods for toric intersection theory, has been added.
- VNumber, a package by Antonino Ficarra and Emanuele Sgroi to compute v-number of homogeneous ideals and v-function of monomial ideals, has been added.
improved packages:
- Many FourTiTwo methods now have a Precision option for setting the integer precision used by 4ti2.
- GeometricDecomposability has been updated to version 1.4.1 with minor updates.
- NumericalAlgebraicGeometry has been updated to version 1.24 with small updates.
- PositivityToricBundles has been updated to version 1.7, adding several new methods, fixing bugs, and updating the documentation and tests.
- ToricVectorBundles has been updated to version 1.2 with updated documentation.
- WhitneyStratifications has been updated to version 2.03, adding new routines to stratify algebraic maps to the package. The update also includes several performance improvements and bug fixes.
functionality added or improved:
- It is now possible to create a fraction field of an iterated polynomial ring using frac.
- A number of new operators have been added that may be used for defining methods. See ^!, _!, ^~, _~, ^>, ^>=, ^<, ^<=, _>, _>=, _<, _<=, |_, and |_=.
- A number of improvements have been made to parallelization. In particular:
  - The function getIOThreadMode has been added for determining the current I/O thread mode.
  - The functions setIOExclusive, setIOSynchronized, and setIOUnSynchronized now also accept a file as an argument.
  - The default I/O thread mode has been changed from 0 (unsynchronized) to 1 (synchronized).
  - Much of the code (e.g., reading mutable hash tables) is now thread safe.
  - The output of GCstats has been improved.
  - The initial heap size used by the garbage collector has been increased and the free space divisor has been decreased.
  - The taskResult function now waits until a task is finished before returning its result.
  - The parallelApply function has been added for applying a function to a list in parallel.
  - The output when using the time keyword now includes the time used by the current thread and in garbage collection.
  - The keyword threadVariable has been renamed to threadLocal, although the former still exists as a synonym.
  See parallel programming with threads and tasks for more.
- The hash counter for mutable hash tables increases much more slowly, decreasing the likelihood of overflowing.
- The take function will now accept a two-element list as its second element if the class of the first element has a iterator method installed.
- Broken links to the Journal of Software for Algebra and Geometry have been fixed in the documentation for older certified packages.
- The documentation page for each certified package now includes its DOI.
- The union function has been added for sets.
- The intersect and intersect functions now work for sets.
- Creating integer quotient rings using ZZ/n now works when n is large and/or composite.
- The syntax g \\ f as a synonym for f // g when f and g are matrices has been deprecated. It will be replaced in the next release.
- Modules may now be compared using <, <=, >, and >=, by their ranks and degrees. In particular, lists of modules may now be sorted.
- The method homomorphism(Vector) was added for getting the homomorphism from an element of a Hom module.
- The method random(Module) was added for generating random elements of modules.
- The method all(BasicList) was added for checking if all elements of a list of booleans are true.
- The method position(ZZ,Function) was added for finding the smallest index for which a function returns true.

The source of this document is in Macaulay2Doc/changes.m2:373:0.