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Re: Re: books on writing packages

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg56695] Re: [mg56664] Re: books on writing packages
• From: "David Park" <djmp at earthlink.net>
• Date: Wed, 4 May 2005 00:33:04 -0400 (EDT)
• Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com

Just to add a little more to the 'obvious': To make effective use of
Mathematica one will almost always have to write some routines. No CAS can
ever cover every need for every subject in a convenient manner.

When working on some subject, I always organize my notebooks in Sections
(always using Automatic Grouping!) My first Section is an Initialization
section. My second Section is always a Routines section. As I write routines
I gather them in the Routines section (and write usage messages for them).
Sometimes, if I have multiple notebooks, I copy the Routines section from
notebook to notebook. After a while, I pick out the routines that seem
really general and useful and move them to a package.

So simply by organizing your notebooks in a sensible way (i.e., the default
way that WRI has set up for us) it is easy to build up routines and
transistion to packages.

David Park
djmp at earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~djmp/

From: David Bailey [mailto:dave at Remove_Thisdbailey.co.uk]
To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net

marlinswin at gmail.com wrote:
> I'd like to learn to write my own packages for both research and
> teaching purposes. Is there any good books or references on package
> authoring?
>
> Thanks.
>
Hi,

I would just like to emphasise that
packages are really only a symbol hiding mechanism. Everything that you
can write inside a package can be written without one. The advantages of
using one or more packages only really kick in when you have a fair
amount of code and several people are working on it. Furthermore, most
people start by creating Mathematica code outside a package and package
it afterwards. By the time you have written enough working code to need
a package, it will probably seem fairly simple to create!

Apologies if I am stating the obvious,

David Bailey
dbaileyconsultancy.co.uk