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Re: A Package Function Tutorial

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg92245] Re: [mg92228] A Package Function Tutorial
• From: Murray Eisenberg <murray at math.umass.edu>
• Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2008 03:31:11 -0400 (EDT)
• Organization: Mathematics & Statistics, Univ. of Mass./Amherst
• References: <200809231135.HAA00876@smc.vnet.net>
• Reply-to: murray at math.umass.edu

Where, exactly, should which files in FunctionTutorial.zip be extracted?

The page "Writing Professional Mathematica Functions" at the cited URL 
says to do so in $UserBaseDirectory, which in my case is:
D:\Math\AddOns.

Do I literally just extract the whole zip archive there, preserving its 
directory tree structure, of course?  Including putting PacletInfo.m at 
the top level of that $UserBaseDirectory??

I ask because that's what I did, and I restarted Mathematica 6.0.3 -- 
with a clean cache just to be sure.  But I don't see how to access the 
documentation now. There's no item for this in Installed Add-ons.  And I 
don't see any other kind of link on the Documentation Center's home page.

Also, what do the files in the directory PlatformInstallClean do??


blackhole at thebushman.net wrote:
> I have written a brief introduction to writing package functions that
> implement most of the bells and whistles one would associate with a
> professionally written function.  Some of the topics covered are
> implementation of Automatic in functions, overloading of built-in
> symbols, and others.
> 
> Yes, most of the material can be found scattered in the shipping
> documentation, but my sense is that there is no good place to find
> essentially a checklist of the features a good function should have,
> like argument checking, attributes, syntax coloring, etc.  You will
> find that I am no expert, but perhaps someone at Wolfram (or
> elsewhere) will be offended enough to contribute some good
> suggestions.
> 
> You can find it at my website, http://www.thebushman.net.
> 
> Here you will also find a package I published last month, a NURBS
> package providing a bridge from parametric curves and surfaces to CAD-
> friendly IGES format.
> 

-- 
Murray Eisenberg                     murray at math.umass.edu
Mathematics & Statistics Dept.
Lederle Graduate Research Tower      phone 413 549-1020 (H)
University of Massachusetts                413 545-2859 (W)
710 North Pleasant Street            fax   413 545-1801
Amherst, MA 01003-9305

• References:
  • A Package Function Tutorial
    • From: blackhole@thebushman.net