The relatively new wolframscript
now accompanies the traditional math
and wolfram
binaries. I am guessing (?) that math
is effectively a deprecated alias for wolfram
, since I can no longer find documentation for math
and the binaries are the same size. So I will focus on wolfram
vs wolframscript
.
It looks to me (from the documentation linked above) that wolframscript
offers a superset of the capabilities of wolfram
. The only comparison I truly care about right now is wolframscript -file file
vs wolfram -script file
(and for systems where they differ, such as Windows, WolframKernel -script file
). Are these essentially identical? As one example, is there any significance to the fact that the wolframscript
documentation does not refer to "script mode" but the wolfram
documentation does? (My presumption is no, but I hate to rely on presumption.)
Finally, does any of this link to file naming conventions. It seems that the extensions .m
, .wl
, and .wls
all remain in use, and this use appears inconsistent in the documentation. As a striking example, the "Code from a File" example for wolfram
literally mixes up whether the example is working with file.wls
or test.wl
. What is the semantic information that is intended by the different extensions, if any? (My presumption is that .wls
should be reserved for files that are made executable on a platform, but I hate to rely on presumption.)
I am very interested in educated guesses by experienced users, but obviously, pinning this down in the documentation would be ideal.