The main features of our software

Next we briefly list the main features of our software package PHC.

1. Because the program offers a general-purpose solver, it might not always provide the optimal way to solve a particular system.
2. Numerical methods are used. At best we can hope to obtain approximate solutions which can be refined up to machine precision.
3. A great variety of homotopy continuation methods has been implemented, as the package strives to be a complete solver.
4. The package incorporates recent research advances for sparse polynomial systems, for which a computational breakthrough has been achieved.
5. The software has been written in Ada and has been ported to three different machine types, both via a commercial compiling system and the gnu-ada compiler.
6. PHC is menu-driven and no compilation is necessary to run it.
7. The package has been tested on a large benchmark of polynomial systems. It has been used actively in solving mechanical design problems, see [25].