DESCRIPTION

These notes summarize the modifications made for spec release 2.8, as finalized on August 6, 1988.

CHANGES

The four-circle motors are now consistently referred to in the order tth th chi phi throughout spec. (Previously, the order of chi and phi was reversed.) The macros with changed usage are pl, upl and ci. All the macros that produce output (wh, the scans, etc.) use the new ordering convention.

The global variable referring to the data file has been changed from FILENAME to the more revealing DATAFILE.

The order of arguments in the built-in functions dial(), user(), chg_dial() and chg_offset() has been changed to make the motor number the first argument in each case. This change makes the argument ordering of these four functions consistent with the functions get_lim() and set_lim().

A new function named motor_mne(i) returns the mnemonic assigned to motor number i in the config file. The internal _check0 macro, called by all standard macros that allow a motor number or mnemonic as an argument, now checks its argument against all valid mnemonics, rather than just that for motor 0, as it had previously.

Most scans macros now include prescan motor-limit checks.

Previously, certain of the calc() calls to the geometry code (calcA and calcAB, in particular) filled the A[] array with the current motor positions. That no longer happens.

The four-circle geometry code has been made more robust (we like to think).