Hi

I am bothering just to request as a future feature what described in the subject.
It is really a must . The program is increasing in capabilities and I guess that a lot of people is developing functions that facilitates some calculation ( or animations ) like the one below reported ; but is frustrating that is not possible to recall them easily .
Actually the only way to address this issue ( I guess ) is to turn a UDF in a Snippet and add it at the beginning of the page where is foressen to use it ( something similar to the include of a c program).

Best regards and thanks a lot for the costant efforts to improve this program.

Francesco

Hello Francesco,

I agree with you and have been thinking about it as well. The problem is that the UDF can be redefined, as everything else. The simplest way that comes to my mind is just to have an option in the Dynamic assistance to sort the things on item types not only on the alphabetic order of the item names. That way, you can have grouped variables, functions, units, snippets etc. and whenever you activate Dynamic assitance their descriptions an values will be actuall and valid depending on the position in the worksheet. For instance, if you like to see what functions are defined on the actual place in the worksheet, just activate Dynamic assistance and look under "User Defined Functions" group.

Regards,
Radovan

Hello Radovan,

for this feature I was thinking to something slightly different . For istance have a directory called UDF like the Snippet one where to save the files that contain mainly functions useful to address a specific type of problems ( so probably would be better to have subdirectories in the UDF with folders specific for Quadrature, Ode,Plotting,sound,ecc functions) . The program should be able to retrive from these files the name of the stored functions and show them in the Insert Function Screen.
Probably this is not too difficult to achieve ..but the difficult part is the documentation side.
How to clearly specify or document the meaning of the input(output) parameters/variables used in the function and the aim of the function itself
Hope that something will be developed for this feature, the organization of the UDF informations is crucial to succeed .

Best regards

Francesco

I also think that it would be very nice to use Smath files to define functions that would appear in the "Insert Functions" dialog. The capability to insert snippets combined with collapsible regions is also nice and comes close to the same functionality. On the other hand, it would be very cool to be able to create functions from .sm files that behave just like native Smath functions. Andrey would be able to tell us whether this is possible or practical.

BTW This topic was also discussed in this discussion thread. It makes for interesting reading.

Yes you are right, Will, it was quite an extensive discussion. The same things there were discussed about, as Francesco mentioned as well.
I think that all the things that have been recently introduced (collapsible regions, snippets, functions as functions arguments, multiline functions, etc.) are all in favor of making functions from .sm files that could behave like native SMath functions. I also have no doubt that Andrey will find the way sooner or later and to decide if this could be possible or practical - as you mentioned.

Regards,
Radovan