There are, at present, two ways to create plots with WIP: interactively or by reading plot command files from the command line. Command line plotting is an efficient way to spool plots to a printer or to load plot command files and macros when starting WIP. Command line plotting will be discussed more fully in Appendix B. Interactive plotting consists of typing the commands that generate the plot, one at a time, and seeing the results. This chapter describes the user interface used by WIP.
When WIP is started, certain commands and parameters
are defined by the program as well as by the user
(see Appendix A
for details on creating your own initialization file).
The user is then presented with the standard WIP prompt (WIP>)
and commands may be then entered one per line.
Command lines in WIP consist of one or more ``words'' that are
separated by some combination of either spaces or commas.
These ``words'' may be alphabetic, numeric, or a combination of both and
represent the command names and their respective arguments.
Command names in WIP are case insensitive (i.e. commands may be entered in
either lower case, upper case,
or a mixture of both).
Arguments to a command that will be displayed
(e.g. a string of characters that will appear in a
label ) does, however, remain case sensitive.
Command names in WIP may also be abbreviated to uniqueness.
If a command typed by the user is not unique, WIP will issue a warning
and ignore the ambiguous command.
The exception to this rule is exact matches;
a complete command name will always match.
As an example of how to type commands in interactive mode, suppose a user wanted to draw a single line from one position to another. The following listing illustrates the commands the user would type and an example of WIP's response to an ambiguously stated command:
Some of WIP's commands have a number of arguments which must be specified. If a command requires a certain number of arguments to function properly and an insufficient number of arguments are given with the command, then WIP will issue a warning to the user. For example, if the user typed the move command without the two required arguments, WIP would warn the user:
We have already introduced the main WIP prompt (WIP> ). There are two other prompts in WIP: DEFINE> and INSERT> . These prompts appear in response to the commands define and insert , respectively, and are discussed further in Section 7.4.
Comments may be entered along with WIP commands. The comment character is the pound sign (#) and everything from this character to the end of the input line is ignored by WIP. One exception to this are commands involving labels (see Section 3.6). Since there is no easy way for WIP to determine whether the comment character is part of the string or not, it generally is assumed to be part of the text and is passed to the command as part of the text to label. Hence, comment characters should not be used with these commands. In most of the examples shown in this manual, comments are used to describe the command or specify arguments in the definition of macros. If you are trying these examples interactively, you need not type the comment character nor any of the text that follows it.
Last, but certainly not least, WIP provides the user with three
different types of on-line help .
See Section 3.2 for a description of each of these types of help.