DESCRIPTION

These notes summarize the modifications made for spec release 2.9, as finalized on October 10, 1988.

CHANGES

Invoking spec with -y will force the motor registers to be changed to agree with the settings file when the program starts up. If you are confident the settings file is okay, and know the motor registers have been wiped out, say by shutting off crate power, then this option ought to be just the thing.

The message noting the discrepancy between motor-controller registers and program memory now shows the values of each in user units (angles) in addition to steps.

Hitting a hard motor limit will cause the program to reset to command level, whether in a scan or in a command file. Previously, although motor motion was aborted on a hard limit, command execution continued.

The prdef command now shows backslashes associated with escaped delimiter characters within a macro definition, as in:

def silly 'print "Who\'s on first?"'

Previously, these backslashes were not shown.

All instances of the command move_all in the standard macros have been replaced by the macro move_em. The default definition of move_em is simply move_all. The purpose of move_em is to make it easy for the user to include limit checks of moves that involve more than one motor by redefining move_em.

A new macro mesh that performs a mesh scan of any two motors is included.

The wm and uwm macros now check that their arguments are valid motor names.

A new built-in command local (with the same syntax as the global command) can be used to reuse a preexisting variable name and give the new instance of that name scope only within and below the curly-bracketed block in which it is defined. A known bug with the current implementation is that you cannot use the global keyword at the same level or lower to unlocalize use of a previously local-declared variable name.

The motor screen for the edconf configuration and settings editor now wraps around when changing motor columns instead of sticking at motor 0 or at the last motor.

The CAMAC drivers can be optionally compiled either to allow only the super user to issue a Z or to allow any user to issue a Z. Previously, it was only super-user only.

This release supports the 386/ix operating system on 80386-based machines. See the 386 help file.