[comp.sys.next] Help in Mathematica

Garance_Drosehn@mts.rpi.edu (04/23/91)

In article <1991Apr23.025216.11147@mp.cs.niu.edu>
            bennett@mp.cs.niu.edu (Scott Bennett) writes:
>In article <HARDY.91Apr21222959@golem.ps.uci.edu> 
            hardy@golem.ps.uci.edu (Meinhard E. Mayer (Hardy)) writes:
>>     (the Mathematica 1.2 I got with my NeXt station
>>     does not have help at all).
>
>     Actually, 1.2 *does* have a fair amount of help stuff and it
>works just fine under NS 1.0a.  NS 2.0 broke it and nobody expects
>it to be fixed until Mathematica 2.0 comes out.


I'm not a Mathematica wizard, but I had to install version 1.2 of Mathematica
on some NeXT 2.0 machines.  I don't know if the following solves all the help
problems, but I did notice that if you select "help" from the menu you get a
dialog that is showing you nothing.  The dialog has a scroll bar in it, but
there's no control in the scroll bar (as if the window is showing everything
there is to show).

I found that if you click in the scroll bar, the help information magically
appears.  I don't know if *all* the help info appears, but quite a bit shows
up.

- Garance Alistair Drosehn   = gad@eclipse.its.rpi.edu for NeXT mail
  (frequent readers of c.s.n will notice that a lot of my posts
   start with "I have no idea what I'm talking about, but..."  :-)

hardy@golem.ps.uci.edu (Meinhard E. Mayer (Hardy)) (04/23/91)

In article <g7rg46#@rpi.edu> Garance_Drosehn@mts.rpi.edu writes:
>>   I'm not a Mathematica wizard, but I had to install version 1.2 of Mathematica
>>   on some NeXT 2.0 machines.  I don't know if the following solves all the help
>>   problems, but I did notice that if you select "help" from the menu you get a
>>   dialog that is showing you nothing.  The dialog has a scroll bar in it, but
>>   there's no control in the scroll bar (as if the window is showing everything
>>   there is to show).
>>
>>   I found that if you click in the scroll bar, the help information magically
>>   appears.  I don't know if *all* the help info appears, but quite a bit shows up.
It does indeed --  shows that I am not an experimentalist.
Howver, the responcse is somewhat erratic, and not really
context-sensitive; i.e, if you scroll up or down chances are you might
find what you want.  Command-completion does not work either.
Let's hope version 2.0 fixes this and is out before Maple becomes
available!

Greetings,
Hardy 
			  -------****-------
Meinhard E. Mayer (Hardy);  Department of Physics, University of California
Irvine CA 92717; (714) 856 5543; hardy@golem.ps.uci.edu or MMAYER@UCI.BITNET

jjfeiler@nntp-server.caltech.edu (John Jay Feiler) (04/23/91)

hardy@golem.ps.uci.edu (Meinhard E. Mayer (Hardy)) writes:

[stuff about Mma 1.2 not working under 2.0 deleted]

>Let's hope version 2.0 fixes this and is out before Maple becomes
>available!

Why?  Maple supplies source to all its algorithms, mma supplies none.  Would
you trust an algorithm that you can't find out about in your research?

(by the way, Mma will almost definitely be available before Maple V on the
NeXT....)

>Greetings,
>Hardy 
>			  -------****-------
>Meinhard E. Mayer (Hardy);  Department of Physics, University of California
>Irvine CA 92717; (714) 856 5543; hardy@golem.ps.uci.edu or MMAYER@UCI.BITNET