Re: if-then-else in iocsh

[Andrew Johnson <anj@aps.anl.gov>]

Emmanuel Mayssat wrote:
> I was thinking about using a registar function as follow:
> default("${BR}",9600)
> that would check the value or $BR and if not set, then put 9600.
> (and so far nobody mentioned that solution!! )

Actually that was one of my earlier suggestions.

> but what I really want to do is an if then else in iocsh

You're welcome to try to add an if-then-else command to your own version 
of iocsh, since EPICS is Open Source.  However we're not likely to 
accept any patches that implement this into the official release because 
we don't want the iocsh to become Yet Another Programming Language. 
Eric Norum has in the past linked the tcl language up to EPICS so you 
can write startup scripts in tcl if you want to do intelligent 
processing in them, although his code was never published.

My point was that setting a default in the way you're suggesting could 
very easily cause you problems, whether you add an if-then-else 
construct to iocsh or write a defaultEnv(variable, value) command. 
Imagine two dbload files with this pseudocode:

a.dbl:
  if unset(X) then X=1
  dbLoadRecords a.db, X=${X}

b.dbl:
  if unset(X) then X=2
  dbLoadRecords b.db, X=${X}

If we execute these in this order with X unset:
  < a.dbl
  < b.dbl
the dbLoadRecords commands will expand out to this:
  dbLoadRecords a.db, X=1
  dbLoadRecords b.db, X=1
whereas if we execute them in the reverse order:
  < b.dbl
  < a.dbl
they will expand out to this:
  dbLoadRecords b.db, X=2
  dbLoadRecords a.db, X=2

I'm just warning you to be prepared for this to happen.

- Andrew
--
Dear God, I didn't think orange went with purple until I saw
the sunset you made last night.  That was really cool. - Caro