Files for Packages
When you create or use
Mathematica packages, you will often want to refer to files in a system-independent way. You can use contexts to do this.
The basic idea is that on every computer system there is a convention about how files corresponding to
Mathematica contexts should be named. Then, when you refer to a file using a context, the particular version of
Mathematica you are using converts the context name to the file name appropriate for the computer system you are on.
| <<context` | read in the file corresponding to the specified context |
Using contexts to specify files.
This reads in one of the standard packages that come with Mathematica. |
| name.mx | file in DumpSave format |
| name.mx/$SystemID/name.mx | file in DumpSave format for your computer system |
| name.m | file in Mathematica source format |
| name/init.m | initialization file for a particular directory |
| dir/... | files in other directories specified by $Path |
The typical sequence of files looked for by <<name`.
Mathematica is set up so that
<<name` will automatically try to load the appropriate version of a file. It will first try to load a
name.mx file that is optimized for your particular computer system. If it finds no such file, then it will try to load a
name.m file containing ordinary system-independent
Mathematica input.
If
name is a directory, then
Mathematica will try to load the initialization file
init.m in that directory. The purpose of the
init.m file is to provide a convenient way to set up
Mathematica packages that involve many separate files. The idea is to allow you to give just the command
<<name`, but then to load
init.m to initialize the whole package, reading in whatever other files are necessary.
