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Tips for Mongo Users

Differences from Mongo

Enhancements:

  Any number of vectors may be defined.
  Vectors may be manipulated arithmetically.
  Vectors are named.
  Vectors may be defined from the keyboard using DO loops or expressions.
  Vectors may be defined using the cursor.
  Any vector may be used for plotting.
  Any vector may be used for the PTYPE or ERRORBAR commands.
  A history feature is implemented.
  The playback buffer may be edited.
  Macros may be defined from the keyboard, and edited.
  A DO construct is available.
  A FOREACH construct is available.
  Character strings may be read from a file and used freely as labels or names.
  Data may be read from rows as well as columns in files.
  Only those parts of a vector satisfying a logical condition need be plotted.
  Vectors may be sorted or fit with splines.
  Macros exist for doing least square fit to sets of points,constructing
cumulative distributions and histograms, drawing circles, and shading regions.
  All devices have the same range of device coordinates, 0-32767.
  The entire SM environment may be saved for later resumption with SAVE
and RESTORE.
  The special variable $date expands to the current date and time.
  You can define private point types.

There are also a few incompatibilities:

  DEFINE is used to define variables; macros are defined
using MACRO.
  Macro arguments must be declared, and are referred to as $n,
not &n.
  The form LIMITS is not supported (it's meaningless); use
LIMITS x y, or the macro lim, mentioned above.
(But note that READ OLD allows for these, and makes suitable changes.)
  WINDOW now takes 4 arguments.

The READ OLD command

Note that it is advisable to convert these old Mongo macro files to SM macros, to enable you to take advantage of SM's features. You can do this by simply using READ OLD to read them into SM, and then MACRO WRITE or SAVE to write the converted macro out to disk.

There is also a macro equivalent of the old INPUT command.

input     1     ## read and execute a Mongo (not SM) file
                READ OLD _temp $1
                _temp
                MACRO _temp DELETE

The compatibility macro

This version of compatibility is more complete than in pre-version 2 SM, it also conflicts more strongly with normal SM operations.

The macro compatibility defines mimics for the Mongo commands which assume that the only vectors are x and y. We strongly recommend that you do not use this macro! If you want to use it anyway, commands like limits alpha beta will give syntax errors. You can turn compatibility mode off again with compatibility 0. The macro itself is a little complicated, it turns off the special meaning of (e.g.) limits, and replaces it with a macro that reproduces the old behaviour, in this case LIMITS x y. The new definitions are in the file `compatible' in the default macro directory, as specified in your `.sm' file. At the time of writing, the commands connect, errorbar, histogram, limits, list, points, read, and window are redefined to reproduce the old syntax. In addition, help is defined to not appear on your history buffer, and define is defined to create macros interactively. You might also be interested in other redefinitions of commands (e.g. list to mean list the playback buffer), if so look at `overloading' in the index. It should be clear that this set of definitions could thoroughly confuse SM if you try to take advantage of its features; in the realm of compatibility mode, it is strictly caveat emptor.

compatible 11   ## define macros to be compatible with Mongo
                # If the argument is non-zero or omitted, 
                # compatibility mode is turned on.
                # note that some of these make it hard to use regular SM!
                if($?1 == 0) {
                   compatible 1
                   RETURN
                }
                if($1 == 0) { 
                   MACRO DELETE "$!macro"compatible
                }
                FOREACH w { connect define errorbar help histogram limits \
                       list points read window write 2 {
                   OVERLOAD $w $1
                }
                if($1) {
                   MACRO READ "$!macro"compatible
                }
                #               So newline will end IF statement

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