A windows ole question - howto start an external application

Dear Stephen,

thanks for responding. Unfortunately, I am too inexperienced to follow your
guidance (as well as Hal's).
I do know however, that I can't open the file I want and load the program
with it, because that file is just a text file (produced by Ruby , of course)
  which is then converted to Maple input format as if it were entered
interactively
into a Maple window.

My question actually is: once I know I know to open external application XYZ
and I know where the executable is and what its properties are, how do
I determine what to tell Ruby to open it under Windows XP ?
Could you give an example with CreateProcess() that does this ?

Thank you very much,

Axel

Nuralanur@aol.com wrote:

thanks for responding. Unfortunately, I am too inexperienced to
follow your guidance (as well as Hal's). I do know however, that I
can't open the file I want and load the program with it, because
that file is just a text file (produced by Ruby , of course) which
is then converted to Maple input format as if it were entered interactively into a Maple window.

My question actually is: once I know I know to open external
application XYZ and I know where the executable is and what its
properties are, how do I determine what to tell Ruby to open it
under Windows XP ? Could you give an example with CreateProcess()
that does this ?

Does Maple have an OLE API?
<some googling later>
Yes! It's called openmapple and there are examples on how to use it in C, Java and VB (Application Center - Maplesoft) They need registration to login so I didn't go further, but I am prety sure the VB examples will give you the OLE provider name you need to start the app.
Cheers,
V.-

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