Transfering Packages Between Platforms and InputForm Conversions
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg42249] Transfering Packages Between Platforms and InputForm Conversions
- From: "David Park" <djmp at earthlink.net>
- Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2003 01:53:44 -0400 (EDT)
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
MathGroup, A week or so ago I asked Mac owners to help test several of my packages written in Windows. I had had problems with several users not being able to evaluate a package or notebook correctly on a Mac without errors although they worked fine on Windows systems. A number of MathGroup participants were kind enough to test. I thank them all. One Mac person got no errors at all on one computer. Most Mac people got fleeting warning messages (they came and went with hardly time to read them) about Contexts but then everything evaluated properly. There is still one Mac person who it won't evaluated for, but he is working with 4.0. When I isolated the offending statement and converted it to InputForm, the fleeting messages went away. So I am still not certain as to the best method to write normal Mathematica packages that will be platform independent. I think the WRI claim of platform independence is not strictly true. In any case, in some of my packages I starting going through to change all the cells to InputForm. But then I discovered a very bad feature in doing these conversions. If you name a variable Global`t, say, Mathematica throws the Global` away! I think this is an outright bug. Sometimes, in a package, I want to use a Global variable, for example if I am returning a parametrization. (I always have it as an optional argument and allow the user to supply another symbol if he wishes.) So Mathematica should not be stripping contexts off symbols when converting to InputForm. Another annoying feature of converting between Forms is that all comments are stripped away. I think that some internal commenting in code can be very useful. But now I've gotten into the habit of not using internal comments because I know that sooner or later I'll do a conversion between forms and Mathematica will throw it away. I think that comments should be retained and considered a normal part of InputForm. David Park djmp at earthlink.net http://home.earthlink.net/~djmp/