    NOTES ON THE VERSION OF 1996-08-26:

    Major changes in this version:

    1) Specification of data models has been separated from specification
       of networks, in order to facilitate the eventual use of these same
       models with functions defined in other ways than by networks.  The
       model specification arguments of net-spec have disappeared; they
       are instead given to the new model-spec program.

    2) Models for survival data have been added.  They should be regarded
       as experimental, however.

    3) Documentatation on data models has been expanded and moved out of
       net-spec.doc, to the new model-spec.doc (in util).  Documentation
       on prior specifications has been moved from net-prior.doc to
       prior.doc.  Many revisions have been made to other documentation
       files.

    4) A number of new Markov chain Monte Carlo methods have been added.
       These may or may not be of any use for neural network models.

    5) The method for sampling top-level hyperparameters has been changed
       from the rejection method described in section A.2.2 of the thesis
       to the adaptive rejection sampling method due to Gilks and Wild.
       The message, "WARNING: Over 10000 tries in one call of cond_sigma"
       will now never appear.

    6) The 'rand' module is now automatically told to find its file of
       natural random numbers ('randfile') in the 'util' directory where
       it is located.  This is done in 'util.make', which should be
       changed if some other behaviour is desired.

    Note that modification (1) above is not upwardly compatible, though it
    should be very easy to modify command files to use the new scheme.
    Also, log files created with the previous version cannot be read with
    this version.

    SPECIAL NOTE:  This is the version of the software that Carl Rasmussen
    used for the tests reported in his thesis.

    Known bugs.

    1) The facility for plotting quantities using "plot" operations in xxx-mc
       doesn't always work for the first run of xxx-mc (before any
       iterations exist in the log file).  A work-around is to do a run of
       xxx-mc to produce just one iteration before attempting a run of
       xxx-mc that does any "plot" operations.