Pass symbols through MathLink with full context information

How can I ensure that symbols passed through MathLink retain their full context information? When using MathLink naively, they do not.

Demonstration, controlling another kernel:

link = LinkLaunch["\"" <> First[$CommandLine] <> "\" -mathlink"]; LinkRead[link]; (* read initial prompt *) foox; (* create symbol *) AppendTo[$ContextPath, "foo"]; (* add foo to context path so now x refers to foox *)

Context[x] (* verify the context of x *)
(* "foo" *)

LinkWrite[link, Unevaluated@EvaluatePacket[Context[foox]]] (* send foox to the other kernel and check its context there *)
(* Hold[ReturnPacket["Global"]] *)


The other kernel thinks that x has context Global. It must have been sent without any context information. I want it to retain its context, foo, while being sent over.

It's the same situation when sending symbols back through the link: they do not retain context information.

I do have a sort of a workaround: temporarily unset $ContextPath on both sides of the link. Block[{$ContextPath},
LinkWrite[link, Unevaluated@EvaluatePacket[Block[{$ContextPath}, (* code goes here*)]] ]  But this has obvious undesirable effects. For example, what if the code that is being sent has ToExpression? Parsing is influenced by $ContextPath. What if the code sets $ContextPath? Many things will break in obscure ways. This can be made more complicated to fix some of the problems, but I am hoping for a better way. If I do the same experiment with the parallel tools (ParallelEvaluate[..., DistributedContexts -> None]), I see that context information is in fact preserved. So there must be a way to accomplish this. • Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat. – Mr.Wizard Nov 30 '16 at 4:24 1 Answer The best I could come up with so far is the following code. It sends some code through link to another kernel for evaluation, then it retrieves the result. linkEval[link_][HoldComplete[code_]] := Module[{result}, Block[{$ContextPath = {}, $Context = "myPrivateContext"}, LinkWrite[link, Unevaluated@EvaluatePacket[$result = code;
Block[{$ContextPath = {},$Context = "myPrivateContext"},
OwnValues[$result] ] ] ] ]; While[True, result = LinkRead[link]; Switch[result, _ReturnPacket, Break[], _TextPacket, Print@First[result], _, Null (*Print[result]*) ] ]; Replace[result, ReturnPacket[{_ :> expr_}] :> HoldComplete[expr]] ]  The Block[{$ContextPath={}, $Context = "myPrivateContext"}, ...] is a hack to force sending fully qualified symbol names. I want this even for System symbols because the link may connect kernels of different versions, so we set it to {} instead of allowing the default {"System", "Global"}. We don't want to evaluate code with a special $ContextPath, so we evaluate it normally and assign the result to $result. To prevent a second evaluation of the contents of $result, we send back its OwnValues. This is again done in such a way so that symbol names are sent with the context prepended.

This seems to work in most situations, e.g. evaluating Sequence[] returns as Sequence[]. Evaluating Unevaluated[] also return as Sequence[] because several symbols we use (e.g. RuleDelayed in OwnValues) are only HoldAll and HoldSequence but not HoldAllComplete. But the parallel tools don't do any better either.

• To get fully-qualified symbol names, try something like Block[{Internal\$ContextMarks = True}, ...]` – ilian Sep 26 '17 at 14:47
• @ilian Wow, thanks for pointing that out! This stuff should really be documented to some extent, along with things like WithLocalSettings, InheritedBlock, etc. This doesn't even appear in the parallel tools source code. – Szabolcs Sep 26 '17 at 18:53