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Re: "Abort Evaluation" does not work

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg111958] Re: "Abort Evaluation" does not work
  • From: Bill Rowe <readnews at sbcglobal.net>
  • Date: Sun, 22 Aug 2010 08:09:01 -0400 (EDT)

On 8/21/10 at 4:17 AM, siegman at stanford.edu (AES) wrote:

>Many, many of us have of course run into the same problem.

>So, another question would be:  if you look up "Abort" in
>Mathematica's documentation, will it give you a little warning about
>this, so you'll understand what's happening?

>Wanna bet?

Arguably, this characteristic of Abort is documented in the
documentation. At the bottom of the documentation page for Abort
under Tutorials is "Interrupts and Aborts" a clickable link that
brings up more information. Part of that tutorial reads:

The function Abort[] has the same effect as interrupting a
computation, and selecting the abort option in the interrupt menu.

What is not said is computations are done in the kernel not the
front end. That information is elsewhere. Armed with the
information computations are done by the kernel, it should be
apparent, Abort stops the kernel not the front end. And that
clearly implies anything already sent to the front end to
display will be unaffected by using Abort.

There are improvements that can be made to the documentation.
But, it is clearly impractical for the documentation for each
individual command to be stand alone documentation that covers
all aspect of that command without needing to look at any other
documentation for Mathematica. A direct consequence of this is
users unfamiliar with Mathematica will not have a complete
understanding of a command by reading just the documentation
page for that command.



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