While working through
Programming Paradigms via Mathematica (A First Course) I came across this in lesson 25.
Without formally opening a file, there is a quick way to ask Mathematica what the entire contents of the file are: " !!".
Execute " !!file", where "file" is the file name (without quotation marks!), and Mathematica will simply dump the contents of the file onto the screen.
However the example that they gave failed to display any data as shown by the input and output below:
In[3]:= !!FILE1
Out[3]:= FILE1
Although the rest of the section seemed to work as described:
First, let's read in a single Number, which we expect to be "1".
In[11]:=num = Read[fileref,Number]
Out[11]= 1
And so on.
I have queried the documentation center about !! and looked through information on File Operations, and have found no mention of this syntax.
I am wondering if this was a feature of the first version that has either been discontinued or changed, and also if the need to view contents of a file dumped on the screen is important in learning about files as representations of data.
