VOC PA-Type Records  -  Paragraphs

A paragraph is a sequence of stored commands or sentences which will be executed in turn by entering the paragraph name in response to the command prompt.

Field 1 of the VOC paragraph record commences with PA, fields 2 onwards are the commands to execute. Any sentence within the paragraph may be broken into shorter parts by using the underscore character to indicate that the command continues on the next line.

The Cn and In control codes of inline prompts may be used to substitute additional text from the sentence that started the paragraph into the commands within the paragraph.

Paragraphs may contain a number of special commands and constructs that are not allowed in sentences. These are

Comment lines may be included in a paragraph. These have an asterisk as the first non-space character. There must be at least one space between the asterisk and the actual comment text. Note that expansion of inline prompts is the first action of the command processor and hence inline prompts are evaluated in comment lines. This slightly odd behaviour is useful in controlling the timing and sequence of inline prompts independently from the use of their substitution text.

QM also supports block comments in paragraphs. A block comment begins with a line that starts with "/*". All lines until and including one ending with "*/" are treated as comments.

Paragraphs may invoke other paragraphs. Beware of accidental recursive invocation of the same paragraph.

There are four reserved paragraph names for special functions. These are:

The QMSYS account may contain a paragraph with a further reserved name:

For more details of the above, see Command Scripts.

A summary of PA-type VOC records may be displayed or printed using LISTPA.