
The goal of the Atlas of Reductive Lie Groups is to provide access to the
representation theory of real reductive Lie groups. For the moment, these
are defined to be the groups of real points of connected complex reductive 
groups defined over R.

As a preliminary, the classification and structure theory of these groups
is made accessible.

The program works with a command interface. Input is done through the GNU
readline library, so that the usual facilities of line-editing, arrow-history 
and tabbed command completion are available.

Some commands put the program in a special "mode"; this is usually apparent
from the fact that the prompt changes. The idea is to avoid polluting the
global command space with rarely used names (or worse, with names that create
annoyance when typed by accident), and/or to allow some command names to
behave differently under certain circumstances. The typical example of this
is help mode. The modes function as a pushdown stack : on exiting a mode we 
are put back in the mode where we came from. Type "q" to exit a special
mode; in particular, type "q" to exit help mode and return to the program.

You can always type "help" whenever you have the prompt. This puts you
in help mode, where typing a command results in a brief description of its
workings.

