Running program from Home or Program menu

[cyrille de brébisson]

Hello,

There are a lot of interractions possible between Home and Cas...
You can seamlessly call from one to the other, use variables from one to the other...

Now, the devil is in the details...
Cas is fundamentally a "global" scripting system designed to do one task at a time. As such, there is no "namespace", no isolations of various parts... no local variables (or at least they are verry different than normal ones)... This all makes sense when you concider the uses that the CAS was designed for...
Cas is also, by design, symbolic, meaning that a variable there has a different meaning than a "variable" in a programming language (it does not need to be a value, it can be an unknown)...

On the other hand, Home is a separated environment with various "regions" (apps, programs), which are designed to no interfeer with each others so that a student can do (or at least save) multiple work at the same time, and work on one without the other interfeering.
It has a programming language which is much closer to "standard 3rd generations languages" (for example a local variable is only accessible in the function where it is declared, not in a sub function)...

A lot of things have been put into place to allow cross talk of the 2, but sometimes, things are at odds. For example, when should a variable be a "math variable": undefined, or at least unevaluated, or a "programming variable": defined and evaluated...

Unfortunately, it is not always possible to pick it up from the context, or it can be 100% ambiguous... this means that the user is forced to explicitly tell the system what to do, which feels like jumping through hoops :-(

Anyhow, Cas has an Ans, Home has an Ans, they are NOT the same (for various reasons, one of them being that Home and Cas object are not 100% exchangable), so when you use a Cas function in home, then the Cas Ans takes priority over the home one...

Cyrille