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Re: binary notebook

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On 5/20/11 at 6:37 AM, ibmichuco@hotmail.com (ibmichuco) wrote:

>Would Wolfram consider an option to save notebook as a binary/
>executable file? The file would still require the presence of a copy
>of a compatible version of Mathematica via, say,  a library link. I
>can see that this feature would have three benefits:

>1) The "nbx" file would be much faster, possibly much closer to that
>of a compiled fortran/c version, at least for similar numerical
>tasks. This would make Mathematica an excellent tool both in
>development and in production.

The key issue here is portability. If Mathematica could do this
and you were to run Mathematica on say a Windows machine then
send me the resulting file, most likely it would be useless to
me since I run Mathematica on a Mac.

And to some extent, this can be done with Mathematica now.
Version 8 has introduced a number of functions along these
lines. Take a look at CCodeGenerate, LibraryGenerate etc. Also see
CCodeGenerator/tutorial/Overview

>2) People are more willing to distribute propriety codes if they can
>maintain some kind of control over them.

This can already be done in Mathematica without using binary
files. The third party package mathStatistica is distributed in
a manner a user cannot determine how features were coded without
distributing binary executables. Take a look at the function Encode.

>3) You can send people several modules bundled in to a single file,
>and hopefully, due to the library links proposal, the file can still
>be reasonably small in size.

This too can be achieved within the current version of
Mathematica. Mathematica has the function Compress and can
Import/Export to zip files as well as several other popular
compression formats.

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Re: binary notebook Bill Rowe <readnews@sbcglobal.net> - 2011-05-21 10:48 +0000

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