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Re: simplified C API call in MathLink

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg55961] Re: simplified C API call in MathLink
  • From: "ragfield" <ragfield at gmail.com>
  • Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2005 05:26:10 -0400 (EDT)
  • References: <d3835t$cej$1@smc.vnet.net><200504101054.GAA29032@smc.vnet.net> <d3cq78$6ek$1@smc.vnet.net>
  • Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com

On Apr 10, 2005 7:49 PM, Edward Peschko <esp5 at pge.com> wrote:
> Just curious, but does the following have state? Does the MLINK
remember
> what variables were entered into it, so you could print them out
later?

The MLINK is really just a connection to an instance of the
Mathematica Kernel (or any other MathLink program, but it is usually
just used for Kernel connections).  As long as the MLINK remains open,
the Kernel will keep its state.  For example, if one evaluated "a=5"
followed by "a+2" the result would be 7.

> And would you be able to export graphs back to C (using ExportString,
per chance)?
> Or are there embedded nulls to worry about, and if so, how do you
handle them?

Absolutely.  Non-7-bit-ascii characters are treated specially by
MLGetString in that they are escaped like this 0x0 -> \.00, 0xFF ->
\.FF 0xAAAA -> \:AAAA.  There are other string methods that avoid
this.  Which string function you use depends on what type of data you
expect to be returned.  If you did ExportString[..., "GIF"], you would
know you were working with binary data, it would be more appropriate
to call MLGetByteString, which returns the raw data & the length of
that data with no escaping.  However, MLGetByteString does not handle
Unicode characters > 255.

>     just curious, but when you have a MLINK instance, does it count
>     as a separate process instance? I noticed that I cannot have
more
>     than two 'math' processes, without mathematica complaining. Is
this
>     true for MLINK instances?

The sample code I provided will launch it's own instance of the
Mathematica Kernel.  It is possible to connect to an already running
kernel (with cooperation from that kernel), but doing this is tricky.
One app has to create a named link (via TCP/IP or SharedMemory), and
the other side has to connect to it.  Then you have to force the
kernel to wait for evaluations on multiple links.  This is even
tricker.  I believe the J/Link package has a function ShareKernel[]
which does this.  Perhaps you could check into what it is doing.

-Rob


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