Chapter 10
System Programming

Overview

System programming refers to procedures and tools for maintaining the computer system itself, as opposed to application programming. Mathematica is mainly used for programming applications, i.e., solving mathematical problems. In this chapter we develop tools for looking at Mathematica itself. Such tools are useful in program development. For example, we can find all symbols in a context having no documentation, revealing possible omissions or possibly bad package design.

As usual when a system is used to look upon itself, problems of self-referentiality arise. One example is the difficulty of writing a manual for a text-formatting language in that very language. Printing special characters (such as the backslash \ in TeX) requires careful quotation or escape mechanisms to prevent them from acting in the usual way. In Mathematica the main problem is unwanted evaluation of expressions we want to treat as data.

Programs

SystemProgramming.m