Re: binary notebook
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg119083] Re: binary notebook
- From: Bill Rowe <readnews at sbcglobal.net>
- Date: Sat, 21 May 2011 06:48:49 -0400 (EDT)
On 5/20/11 at 6:37 AM, ibmichuco at hotmail.com (ibmichuco) wrote: >Would Wolfram consider an option to save notebook as a binary/ >executable file? The file would still require the presence of a copy >of a compatible version of Mathematica via, say, a library link. I >can see that this feature would have three benefits: >1) The "nbx" file would be much faster, possibly much closer to that >of a compiled fortran/c version, at least for similar numerical >tasks. This would make Mathematica an excellent tool both in >development and in production. The key issue here is portability. If Mathematica could do this and you were to run Mathematica on say a Windows machine then send me the resulting file, most likely it would be useless to me since I run Mathematica on a Mac. And to some extent, this can be done with Mathematica now. Version 8 has introduced a number of functions along these lines. Take a look at CCodeGenerate, LibraryGenerate etc. Also see CCodeGenerator/tutorial/Overview >2) People are more willing to distribute propriety codes if they can >maintain some kind of control over them. This can already be done in Mathematica without using binary files. The third party package mathStatistica is distributed in a manner a user cannot determine how features were coded without distributing binary executables. Take a look at the function Encode. >3) You can send people several modules bundled in to a single file, >and hopefully, due to the library links proposal, the file can still >be reasonably small in size. This too can be achieved within the current version of Mathematica. Mathematica has the function Compress and can Import/Export to zip files as well as several other popular compression formats.