17.5.7 Calculator Internals

This section describes the Lisp functions defined by the Calculator that may be of use to user-written Calculator programs (as described in the rest of this chapter). These functions are shown by their names as they conventionally appear in defmath. Their full Lisp names are generally gotten by prepending ‘calcFunc-’ or ‘math-’ to their apparent names. (Names that begin with ‘calc-’ are already in their full Lisp form.) You can use the actual full names instead if you prefer them, or if you are calling these functions from regular Lisp.

The functions described here are scattered throughout the various Calc component files. Note that calc.el includes autoloads for only a few component files; when Calc wants to call an advanced function it calls ‘(calc-extensions)’ first; this function autoloads calc-ext.el, which in turn autoloads all the functions in the remaining component files.

Because defmath itself uses the extensions, user-written code generally always executes with the extensions already loaded, so normally you can use any Calc function and be confident that it will be autoloaded for you when necessary. If you are doing something special, check carefully to make sure each function you are using is from calc.el or its components, and call ‘(calc-extensions)’ before using any function based in calc-ext.el if you can’t prove this file will already be loaded.