Mathematica immediately allows you to call both standalone programs and individual functions or methods within running programs.
Mathematica's architecture allows external functionality to be represented in a symbolic form that can immediately be manipulated within
Mathematica—and that often makes access to external functionality from within
Mathematica more convenient even than from its own native environment.
Run — run an external command-line program (
!prog to run as a shell escape)
RunThrough — feed standard input to an external program, and capture output
Install — install a
MathLink-installable external program
LinkPatterns — find functions available in a running
MathLink program
mprep — externally prepare a
MathLink-installable C or C++ program
JavaNew — create a new Java object in any specified class
NETNew — create a new .NET object of any specified type
InstallService — install web services from a WSDL description
