Macaulay under MPW

 

Installation of Macaulay on a Macintosh with a hard disk: Drag the folder "Macaulay" to any convenient location on the hard disk. (The entire contents of the folder, arcane though some may seem, are necessary.) Now you are ready to run Macaulay.

Macaulay was originally designed to run under UNIX. In the Macintosh environment MPW provides the services that would be provided by the Unix operating system, and then some! (MPW = Macintosh Programmer's Workshop. The version here provided is licensed from Apple for distribution with Macaulay, courtesy of the Mathematical Sciences Institute at Cornell University.) Thus to run Macaulay you must begin by launching the application MPW, which is inside the Macaulay folder.

When you have launched MPW, you will see a window labeled "Worksheet", and you will be talking to the MPW interpreter, which acts something like the finder. One peculiarity of MPW which is very important for using Macaulay is that it interprets <return> (produced by pressing the return key) differently from <enter> (produced either by pressing the enter key or by holding down the command key while pressing the return key.) If you are new to MPW, try the following exercise to understand the difference:

• Type the word "Directory" (without the quotation marks. You can capitalize or not, since capitals don't matter to MPW). Press <return>. What happens? (Answer: Nothing. MPW acts as an editor, and you have simply moved to the next line, presumably to add more text.)
• Place the cursor anywhere on the line with the word "Directory" and press <enter>. What happens? (Answer: MPW interprets the word "Directory" as a command, and executes it, producing the full name of the "current folder" - that is, the folder whose contents is listed when you select "open" from the file menu.)
• Select the word "Directory" using the mouse. Now press <enter>. What happens? (Answer: Again, MPW executes the selected word as a command. This would also work if you selected many commands together, perhaps on many lines.)
• Again select the word "Directory". Now press <return>. What happens? (Answer: The selected word simply disappears, and is replaced by a blank line! This replacement of selected text is the standard response of a Macintosh editor.

Don't forget that you can use either command-<return> or <enter> (but not command-<enter>!) interchangeably.

• Controlling Macaulay from a window
• Customizing the MPW environment
• Some Peculiarities of Macaulay under MPW