Symbolic Commands

SNOMAN has a very limited number of basic commands. However, one of them, the SET BANK command, allows the user to modify any titles bank as you have just seen above. This is very powerful as all software control is via these banks. However, typing:-

set bank job 1 word 2 to 10

to limit the number of events to process is not exactly intuitive! So, to help, SNOMAN reads a symbol table (the file symbol_table.dat) before it starts to process. The table consists of symbol name and translation entries like this:-

event_limit set bank job 1 word 2 to ! $event_limit 10

The first field (event_limit) is the symbol name which is translated into the following fields up to an optional ! which marks the start of an example. To use a symbol, quote it proceeded by a dollar (a la UNIX) for example, issuing the command:-

$event_limit 10

gets translated into:-

set bank job 1 word 2 to 10

A symbol may optionally be terminated by a second $ which allows a symbol to be replaced without leaving a trailing space. For example, two entries in this table are:-

mc_misc_find_region set bank mcpi 300 word 65 to

d2o 100

So, the command:-

$mc_misc_find_region $d2O$0000

gets translated into:-

set bank mcpi 300 word 65 to 1000000

For more information about symbols and symbolic commands see:-

Companion/Coding/The SNOMAN Symbol Table