Structure of a terminal parameter file

A terminal parameter file is divided into sections, each of which has a pre-defined purpose. The beginning of each section is marked by a heading line, beginning with the character #. The full syntax of a section heading is:

#section_number: section_name

The sections, and their numbers and purpose, are pre-defined by Sculptor. The section name is treated as comment by the compiler. The sections must appear in their correct order in the parameter file.

Section

Use

1

Names

2

General information

3

Standard control sequences

4

User control sequences

5

“Sent by” sequences

6

Special characters

7

Special text

8

User text

9

Property selection sequences

10

Window styling

11

Palette defaults. See Palettes, Palette names.

12

Palette pens. See Pens, Pen names.

Each section may have from 1 to 255 entries, and each entry may itself be divided into up to 255 sub-entries. These are effectively subscripts of the entry, and the square bracket syntax of subscripts is also the form used to indicate sub-entries in the terminal parameter file.

The syntax of an entry is:

entry_number: entry_name = value

The syntax of a sub-entry:

entry_number[subscript]: entry_name = value

The entry name, which consists of any text between the colon and the equals sign, is treated as comment by the compiler.

The syntax and form of the value depends on the section. Each section is documented in detail below. The entries within a section may appear in any order, and need not be consecutively numbered.

Most entries are brief enough to appear on a single physical line, and so an entry is normally terminated by the end of the line. However, a long entry may be continued over more than one line by placing the backslash character (” \ “) at the end of each line to be continued.

Comments may be placed anywhere in the source file. Text which is intended as comment should be placed between the start comment (“ /* ”) and end comment (“ */ ”) characters, as follows:

/* This comment will be ignored by the compiler */

Comments may be nested.

Blank lines in a source file are ignored.


RELATED TOPICS

Terminal parameter files