MASH: Mathematica Scripting Hack
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg17599] MASH: Mathematica Scripting Hack
- From: dreeves at flip.eecs.umich.edu (Daniel Reeves)
- Date: Mon, 17 May 1999 02:14:38 -0400
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
This is a follow-up to my original message,
Re: mathematica scripts (should work like perl and shell scripts)
and the responses I got.
The problem is to address some limitations of using mathematica in batch
mode:
1) no good way to give command line arguments to a mathematica program.
2) cannot do the unix shebang trick to make a mathematica program
an executable file. (like you can with perl and shell scripts)
3) the kernel prints superfluous stuff to stdout (extra newlines and
certain messages)
I would like to propose that Wolfram developers address these issues by
providing a "-script" option to the kernel.
In the meantime, I have created a prototype called MASH (Mathematica
Scripting Hack) which is available at
http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~dreeves/misc/mash/
It is a C mathlink program.
Please take a look at it and let me know your thoughts.
Definitely let me know if you find it useful.
PS: The difference between this and mathscript (www.mathscript.com), as I
understand it, is that mathscript is a system for using mathematica to
serve web pages directly. Presumably you would use it in place of Apache
or whatever webserver you have. (correct me if I'm wrong there)
Mash lets you simply use Mathematica for things like CGI by allowing a
mathematica program to be a single executable file. With Mash,
Mathematica can do everything that perl can do.
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
Daniel Reeves http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/dreeves/
"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would
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