Wolfram System Sessions
The Wolfram System provides a uniquely powerful interactive environment for building up arbitrarily complex computations, under convenient interactive or programmatic control.
Components of the Wolfram System
Kernel — core computational engine
Front end — notebook interface system
Executing Computations
expr; — evaluate expression, but do not print the result
(= at beginning of input) — use free-form linguistic input
Session History »
% — most recent output expression (%%, %%%, ... for earlier outputs)
%n — n th output expression
— copy down an input line (Insert ▶ Input from Above)
Getting Help
— bring up help about a function
?name — give information about functions, symbols, etc.
Aborting
— abort a running calculation (Evaluation ▶ Abort Evaluation)
Evaluation ▶ Quit Kernel — quit the kernel, keeping the front end running
Messages »
Off — switch off a message or a group of messages
Quiet — run a computation "quietly" without outputting messages
Why the Beep? ▪ Why the Coloring?
Session Information »
Directory — current directory
Names — names of known symbols
Notebooks ▪ MemoryInUse ▪ SystemInformation ▪ DateString ▪ ...
Session Customization »
Edit ▶ Preferences — set global front end preferences
Format ▶ Stylesheet — pick the stylesheet for a notebook
Format ▶ Option Inspector — set options for notebooks
$Post ▪ $Path ▪ $CharacterEncoding ▪ $TimeZone ▪ $RecursionLimit ▪ ...
Kernels & Contexts
Evaluation ▶ Kernel Configuration Options — set up additional local or remote kernels
Evaluation ▶ Notebook's Kernel — choose the kernel to connect to
Evaluation ▶ Notebook's Default Context — define scope of symbols