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"?" to find symbols

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg26297] "?" to find symbols
• From: sch at mitre.org (Stuart Schaffner)
• Date: Sun, 10 Dec 2000 00:20:07 -0500 (EST)
• Organization: The MITRE Corporation
• Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com

Sometimes, especially when I have read in some data from a file, I
like to see what symbols have been defined.  If I suspect that there
are symbols of the form foonnn, I will add the command ?Global\foo* to
a notebook.  This has worked for several years.

Using the new version 4.1 on MS Windows 98 (Second Edition), I am
getting unpleasant behavior.  Sometimes it works as expected, but most
of the time the front end hangs.  (microrant:  why is there still no
interrupt/abort for the front end?)  Not only does it hang, but if I
wait for a long time before using CTRL+ALT+DEL to kill it, subsequent
attempts to start up Mathematica hang on "initializing internal
clipboards...".  I was able to restart Mathematica only after deleting
the .m file for the offending notebook.

I presume there is a lot of data to look at in Global, and I shouldn't
be accessing it this way.  Should I always use a namespace, or is
there some other mechanism entirely?

Stu Schaffner
not speaking for The MITRE Corp. nor for the Northeastern University
Dept of Physics