On this page:
About Files, The Configuration File hy.ini, The Result File hy, The RESET Command, The Recent Input Line File hyin, The Log File hy.log, The Notes File notes.txt.
This page gives a first overview, but you do not need to know all the details to start using Hypatia.
Important facts about files in Hypatia:
- As a rule, all files are located in Hypatia's program folder.
- Their names do not contain upper case characters (since file names in Windows are case insensitive, Hypatia can still read files with upper case characters in their names).
- They do not need to have a file extension.
- Spaces are not allowed in file names, nor are the following characters: ? * ( ) \ / | > <. File names must not begin with $ or @.
- All files that Hypatia writes or can read are in plain text format, you can view and edit them with any text editor.
- Numbers are separated by spaces or line breaks, not by commas or other delimiters.
- To open a file in a text editor from within Hypatia see the following page, Editing Files.
Hypatia can use different kinds of files, for scripts, for reading data, for writing data, etc. -- more about all this in the respective chapters.
There are four files, though, which Hypatia creates on its own:
- The configuration file hy.ini
- The result file hy
- The recent input line file hyin
- Optionally, the log file hy.log
This file is created as an empty file when you start Hypatia for the first time.
hy.ini is a script file (see chapter Scripts) that gets executed each time when you start Hypatia.
You can leave it empty, or you can add lines that define your own constants, your own operators, or that configure Hypatia according to your needs and preferences, overriding the default settings.
You will learn more about this in various chapters of this documentation.
The command RESET has the same effect as closing Hypatia and starting it again -- it deletes all results, variables and user defined operators, sets everything back to default, and then processes hy.ini.
Whenever a calculation is performed (though there are exceptions), Hypatia writes the result to the file hy (no file extension).
By default this overwrites the previous result, but Hyptia can also write more than one result, or even a large number of results, into this file. More about this on the page Accumulation Mode.
You can view the content of the file hy by entering the command HY, unless it has more than 40 lines or 4000 characters.
Because writing to hy is slow when it is done in a loop thousands of times or more, results can be redirected to a buffer in memory (see page The Result Buffer in chapter "Results") -- no need to deal with this now, though.
When you enter a calculation line it gets written to the file hyin (no file extension), overwriting the previous line.
Command lines do not get written to hyin, except for $variable = ... lines, @ude = ... lines, and RUN command lines -- about those, in the respective chapters.
This is independent of the ability of Hypatia's input editor to remember previous input lines (see previous page Input Editor).
The file hyin is used by the REPEAT command (see page REPEAT and REPEAT Loops) in chapter "Loops".
In scripts hyin does not get written to.
Hypatia can log your input and Hypatia's responses in the file hy.log.
By default, this option is disabled, you can enable it with the command LOG ON, and disable it again with LOG OFF.
When logging starts, date and time are written to the log file.
You can view the log file in a text editor. Hypatia itself can not make use of this file.
The log file is always appended to, old entries do not get deleted unless you do so by editing the file.
To turn logging on by default, you can add the line LOG ON to the file hy.ini (see above).
This file has no meaning for Hypatia, but you can use it to make notes, for instance about your user defined operators or your scripts (these will be explained in later chapters).
While you could use a file with any name for this purpose, Hypatia has a command to make it particularly easy to use the file notes.txt -- see "Short EDIT Commands" on the next page.
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