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Re: Transfering Packages from Windows to Mac

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg42057] Re: [mg42020] Transfering Packages from Windows to Mac
  • From: John Browne <jbrowne at swin.edu.au>
  • Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 05:44:01 -0400 (EDT)
  • Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com

David,

I have used Mathematica on a Mac since V1, and over the years have 
sometimes found parsing problems even with the .m files created on my 
own machine. Evaluating the initialization cells in a notebook (.nb) 
would work, but when Mathematica went to read in the automatically 
generated .m file, it would generate parsing errors (which I found 
quite bewildering). This seemed to occur more often when reading .m 
files which had been generated in a previous version.

Apart from using only InputForm in the code and setting ShortBoxForm to 
False, I have found that ending each piece of discrete code by a 
semicolon seems to solve many of the problems, as if there were some 
difficulty in interpreting the action of the Return key. Perhaps this 
behaviour differs between Windows and Mac.

John


On Monday, June 16, 2003, at 05:58 PM, David Park wrote:

> Dear MathGroup,
>
> WRI claims that Mathematica notebooks and packages are platform 
> independent.
> My experience is that this claim is less that true. Packages and 
> notebooks
> written on Windows systems cannot be reliably used on Mac systems.
>
> Specifically I have written a complex analysis application that also 
> uses my
> DrawGraphics package. I have set my Mathematica system so ShortBoxForm 
> ->
> False when saving all files. When Bobby Treat runs the application on 
> his
> Windows system he has no difficulties. Murray Eisenberg has also run 
> it on
> Windows without problems. When another friend, Rip Pelletier, runs it 
> on his
> Mac using Version 4.1 he runs into parsing errors.
>
> The package (.m) files have "\" continuation characters in them. Rip 
> finds
> that if he edits out a few particular cases of these, ones associated 
> with
> the error message statements, then the package runs properly. But 
> surely,
> one cannot expect Mac users to go through and edit package files! What 
> is
> the cause of this problem and is there any solution for it? Are there 
> some
> settings in Mac systems that have to be correct to avoid the problem? 
> I am
> very concerned with making these packages work properly on a Mac.

> snip

> David Park
> djmp at earthlink.net
> http://home.earthlink.net/~djmp/
>
>
____________________________
John Browne
School of Engineering and Science
Swinburne University of Technology
Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia
Quantica phone: +613 9431 4007
Quantica fax: +613 9431 0940
jbrowne at swin.edu.au


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