The Magma Environment

• Command completion and interactive line editing
• History system with recall and editing of previous lines
• A hierarchical online help facility
• Packages containing user-defined intrinsics with automatic compilation
• Command-line options at startup
• Environment variables for configuring style of output, etc.
• Get/set functions and procedures for configuring style, etc.
• Verbose options for built-in functions
• Logging of output, redirection of I/O
• Mechanism for saving and restoring user workspaces
• Special file type for fully-featured file I/O
• Ability to execute system commands from within Magma
• Input/output pipes for communication with external programs
• UNIX commands and functions such as process ID, alarm setting, etc.
• A socket mechanism for communicating with other processes (in preparation)