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4.14.1 Introduction to CoCoAServer

Waiting for the completely new CoCoA-5, based on the C++ library CoCoALib (open source, GPL), you may get a good feel of the new capabilities using the CoCoAServer: here the word server stands for serving process doing the computations for CoCoA on the same computer (as opposed to computer server which runs, say, the mail services).

You need to start the CoCoAServer before calling these functions (otherwise an error message will remind you). You don't need to worry about what this really means: what you have to do is just pressing a button ;-). Instructions for starting the server vary depending on the User Interface you use:

[text] From a shell call COCOADIR/CoCoAServer.

[emacs] From the CoCoA menu select (re)start CoCoAServer.

It will respond to any other request from you and from other CoCoA-4 processes connected to the same machine on the same port (using OpenSocket ). You may leave the CoCoAServer running on your computer even if you don't use it: it takes no cpu time while waiting for requests.