Questions tagged [undocumented]

Questions on undocumented functionality of Mathematica. Note that such functions might be subject to change without notice in future versions.

There are a number of contexts, symbols, functions, string option names, various items and syntax forms within Mathematica that are undocumented. Of particular note is the Internal` context which includes some interesting functionality like Internal`InheritedBlock and Expression Bags. Other undocumented contexts can be found via Contexts[].

Be aware that relying on undocumented functionality has some risks. Such functions might be subject to change without notice in future versions, thus code might not work as expected. It is even possible that your code won't work as intended in current versions, as usually there is only partial knowledge available about these undocumented functions.

Some example questions:

327 questions
16
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1 answer

What does Reduce`FreeVariables really do? And can we rely on it?

Very frequently, in answers on this site, the undocumented function Reduce`FreeVariables comes up in the context of generating a list of variables inside an expression. It is especially recommended in answers and comments by reputable members Carl…
QuantumDot
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15
votes
1 answer

The second argument of Signature

I've noticed that Signature can have an undocumented second argument. What does it do? Signature[{1,2,3,4}, ?]
ybeltukov
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10
votes
1 answer

Second argument of Internal`DoubleToString

Does anybody have an idea what the meaning of the second argument of Internal`DoubleToString might be? It accepts also a third argument which seems to be related to the number of leading digits that are to be printed, but even that is not very clear…
Henrik Schumacher
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8
votes
1 answer

Internal`WithTimeStamps usage

I was digging inside the Iconize implementation a little bit and saw that there's a function BoxForm`BoxFormAutoLoad which loads the FormatValues for objects. For the most part it's boring, but one interesting function that I saw in it was…
b3m2a1
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5
votes
0 answers

A lot of undocumented libraries?

Maybe I'm quite naive but I just realized that Mathematica is shipped with a lot of undocumented libraries. On my Linux, with MMA 11, there are more than 1200 *.mx files located in…
Picaud Vincent
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5
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0 answers

How to use the symbols in System`Private`?

Looking at Names["SystemPrivate*"] gives: I'd really like to use and look at the code for some of these symbols, e.g. System`Private`AlgebraicNumberQ Is there any way to do this?
user5601
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1
vote
0 answers

Documentation for undocumented symbols RandomMatrix and SharingList?

In version 10.2, there are symbols Random`RandomMatrix and System`SharingList. I tried some experiments of my own, but could not get anywhere. Does anyone have any information about these symbols, or know how they are supposed to be used?
yode
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1
vote
0 answers

Uploading sketch to Arduino from Mathematica

Since the device drivers for Arduino used by DeviceExecute have very poor performance for writing and receiving serial data to/from Arduino compared with the device drivers for a standard serial port I decided to write my own event handler sketch…
Sascha
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