To Next Page

To Previous Page

Processing Arguments

Developing TACL Routines

107365 Tandem Computers Incorporated 3–3

Table 3-1 lists the built-in functions that support arguments to routines.

Table 3-1. Functions That Support Arguments

Function Description

#ARGUMENT Allows you to define a list of argument types. Compares each argument

against these types. If an argument matches a specified type,

#ARGUMENT returns a number that indicates the position of the argument

type in your list of types. You can optionally specify a variable that will

contain the contents of the argument.

#GETSCAN Returns the number of characters that #ARGUMENT has processed, not

including the routine name and the first character after the name.

#MORE Determines whether an entire argument set has been processed.

#RESET Sets the argument pointer to the beginning of the argument list.

#REST Returns the number of unprocessed arguments.

#SETSCAN Specifies the position at which the next #ARGUMENT function will resume

processing arguments.

How #ARGUMENT Works Use the #ARGUMENT built-in function to specify data types and, in some cases,

entities as arguments. When invoked, #ARGUMENT steps through the list of

supplied arguments.

#ARGUMENT Options

The #ARGUMENT built-in function supports the following options:

PEEK processes an argument but keeps the internal argument pointer at the

current argument.

TEXT specifies a variable to contain an exact copy of the argument.

VALUE specifies a variable to contain the TACL interpretation of the argument

sequence. For example, FILENAME returns a fully-qualified file name, using

defaults if the user did not specify all components of the file name.

You specify options within slashes (/) after #ARGUMENT.

#ARGUMENT Alternatives

Argument types are called alternatives. You specify alternatives after options and

their associated slashes. Alternatives include:

Contiguous characters (CHARACTERS), a string (STRING), or a number

(NUMBER)

Special characters, including “/” (SLASH), “(“ (OPENPAREN), “)”

(CLOSEPAREN), and “,” (COMMA)

Keywords defined in the routine (KEYWORD), such as TYPE or AGE

HP TACL User Manual

Questions and Answers: