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