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What are Common Errors, and What Should I Do?

• If you try to run the program, and it says it can't find graphcap, or font, or edit files, you probably don't have a .sm file. If you do have one, it must be in your main directory. If it is there, it must have been edited to look for the files in the correct place, and not be trying to read them from Baltimore. If the directory specifications are correct, the files probably have not got the correct access permissions set, so whoever installed SM should fix that.

• If you try to plot a vector that you read from a file, and it says the vector is not defined, it probably means that the file has some non numeric stuff in it, that you didn't skip over with the lines command. If not, we have found problems in some cases with SM trying to read a file written by a VMS Fortran program. If yours is such a file, just use the VMS editor to make a new copy of the file, and it should be ok. The thing to look for is whether the file has Fortran carriage control attributes (do a dir/full command on the file, and it will tell you). When you edit it and make a new copy, those attributes will be replaced with normal ones. It does read most Fortran files, and we are not sure how the ones it can't read were written.

• If you make a syntax error, SM will tell you so, and reprint the line with a little arrow indicating the point in the command at which it got confused. One place that a syntax error is apt to arise is if you make use of the ability of SM to accept more than one command on a line. Certain commands cannot be used in this way, because it is ambiguous to the parser what you meant. This is described in the manual (see section 'How The Command Interpreter Works' in The SM Manual).

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