

In this section the Mathematica commands for I/O on expressions are reviewed. The commands that can work with formatted data are reviewed under " Import and Export of Matrices". It also has many commands for I/O with specially formatted data. Mathematica contains commands for I/O on expressions. For example, the function MatrixQ is specific to matrix computation. They can be contrasted with other operations that are specific to linear algebra. These operations are often called structural operations because they work on the structure of Mathematica expressions. The same techniques apply to many other areas in Mathematica, for example, graphics programming, document programming, and symbolic algebra programming.

This is very convenient because it means that a common set of programming constructs will work for programming in many different applications, and not only for linear algebra.

Mathematica operations such as FullForm, Head, Length, and Part will work for any Mathematica expression.
