Re: Compatibility issue in Mathematica 7
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg97753] Re: Compatibility issue in Mathematica 7
- From: Bob F <deepyogurt at gmail.com>
- Date: Fri, 20 Mar 2009 02:42:13 -0500 (EST)
- References: <gpqgii$62c$1@smc.vnet.net>
On Mar 18, 3:57 am, daniele <danielelin... at gmail.com> wrote: > Hello everybody, > I've been using Mathematica 6 for a while and now I'm about to > purchase version 7: I was wondering whether it's possible, in the > latest version, to save a notebook which can be subsequently opened > (and edited) with version 6. To the best of my knowledge, this was not > possible in version 6 (saving for, say, version 5) and it's something > that has always buggered me quite a lot, because I often have the > necessity to exchange notebooks with people who haven't the same > version as me. > > Thank you very much, > Daniele I don't believe there is a way to save a notebook that is version specific from any version of Mathematica. But, it might or might not really matter -- Well, there would be two issues. One that is simple to overcome, is to just try and open the newer notebook in an older version of Mathematica. I believe you will just get a message about the notebook being created in a newer version of Mathematica and it may not work correctly - this is the real problem as it might be difficult or extremely difficult or impossible to really tell for sure. But as long as you are careful about not using routines that do not exist in the older version or version specific syntax you should be OK - but this is hard to predict and may be very difficult especially when going from version 7 to version 5.2, as you would need to have a good list of all the new features and functions in version 6 and 7. The new documentation for version 7 does show a good list of what is new (see online version at http://www.wolfram.com/products/mathematica/newin7/?buildid=1214020 for more info or just enter into the Documentation Center search box "guide/SummaryOfNewFeaturesIn70" and/or "guide/ SummaryOfNewFeaturesIn60" or "guide/NewIn60AlphabeticalListing" or "guide/NewIn60CoreLanguage" ). Does anyone know if the version 6 or 5 documentation is still on the Wolfram web site, and if so where is it? For version 5, there are PDF files containing the entire contents of the Wolfram book that used to be available for version 5. When you open a version 6 notebook file in version 7, I still think you might have some issues as version 7 does some things a bit differently. And when you open a version 5 notebook in version 6 or 7, you automatically get the choice of trying to convert it with the Mathematica Conversion Advisory utility that comes with both 6 and 7. If you try and open a simple 7.0 notebook in 5.2 I think you get the expected message about this notebook being created in a newer version of Mathematica and tells you to upgrade, but not sure what would happen (other than not working of course) if your notebook had some version 7 specific function references -Bob