Sorry for the newbie-ish question, but I’m having trouble loading the Combinatorica package onto Mathematica 8. I would like to use the AllPairsShortestPath function loaded onto Combinatorica, but I don’t know the basics of loading packages onto Mathematica. I’ve been to combinatorica.com, but the download link is just a large webpage with the code. Could someone show me how to load the Combinatorica package onto Mathematica 8? I am not able to upgrade to Mathematica 9, by the way.
If you tap the F1 key and type in AllPairsShortestPath and hit Enter and click on Details do you then see
To use AllPairsShortestPath, you first need to load the Combinatorica Package using Needs[“Combinatorica`”].
If you get a warning message after you evaluate that Needs then just ignore it, they duplicated some, but not all, of the Combinatorica package in the math kernel and it is just letting you know that.
Unfortunately somehow the dancing blinking red hand with the finger pointing at “Details” with a little thought bubble above it saying “Click me, Click me” was left out of the build. So many questions have the answer hiding behind that and it gets missed far too often.
Regarding Combinatorica there is something I found useful. As Bill says it it conflicts with some of the built-in functions/definitions that Mathematica uses. Unloading Combinatorica to get the standard definitions back is sometimes a problem. This here works. First, before loading Combinatorica you need to execute:
<< Utilities`CleanSlate`
then you can load Combinatorica
<< Combinatorica`
and work with it. When you want to go “back to normal” you can use:
CleanSlate["Combinatorica`"]
and you start with a, well, clean slate.
M.
Thanks, I’ll try that out.