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Re: Use of % notation

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg51002] Re: Use of % notation
• From: Jens-Peer Kuska <kuska at informatik.uni-leipzig.de>
• Date: Fri, 1 Oct 2004 04:48:29 -0400 (EDT)
• Organization: Universitaet Leipzig
• References: <cjgi9k$q4k$1@smc.vnet.net>
• Reply-to: kuska at informatik.uni-leipzig.de
• Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com

Hi,

I mean, that if you run the Mathematica kernel alone in a command line
session or Unix shell, than you need %.

Historical it was so that Mathematica 1.x where a program that run in a text
mode interface with an "In[]:=" prompt without any GUI interface or
copy/paste.

On Mac's this was different because a MacOS < 10 had no command line, but
on the most Unix systems or if you don't run a XWindow on the machine 
this simple interface still exist and if you use Mathematica in this way
% is very usefull. Today, where the most people run Mathematica from the
FrontEnd % is alsmost useless, because you can evaluate the cells in
an arbitary sequence and you can't never be sure what % mean in a
Mathematica
notebook.

Regards
  Jens


David Park wrote:
> 
> I'm not sure what you mean, Jens, by "in the FrontEnd".
> 
> In any case, I would say avoid the use of % when it refers to output from a
> different cell. But in doing derivations by a series of calculational steps
> WITHIN ONE CELL I find that % and %% are extremely useful and completely
> safe.
> 
> David Park
> djmp at earthlink.net
> http://home.earthlink.net/~djmp/
> 
> From: Jens-Peer Kuska [mailto:kuska at informatik.uni-leipzig.de]
To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
> 
>  Avoid the usage of % in the FrontEnd.
> 
> Regards
>   Jens