A Recital Primer

A Recital Primer

Lines and Indentation

Tabs and spaces have no significance in Recital. Recital commands can begin on any column of a line. A newline ends the command. If you have particularly long commands, you can extend over multiple lines by placing the line continuation character ; (semicolon) at the end of each line that is to be continued.

echo "This is a one line command"
echo "This is a ;
multi line ;
command"

For better code readability it is recommended that you indent code blocks such as if statements, for loops etc.

// indented code if much more readable and easier to maintain
for i=1 to 10
    name = "hello world"
    if name = "hello world"
        // indent like this
    endif
endfor

Comments

Single line comments

// allows comment lines to be inserted in programs to enhance their readability and maintainability. The // command allows all characters following it on a line, to be treated as a comment and to be ignored by Recital. The // command can be placed anywhere on a line, even following an executable command.

// declare variables
private x,y,z

Multi line comments

/* and */ denote block comments. These can be inserted in programs to enhance their readability and maintainability.

The /* denotes the start of the comment block, the */ the end of the comment block.

All characters between the two comment block delimiters are treated as comments and ignored by Recital.

/* the following lines
     are multi
     line comments */
private x,y,z

Macros

Variable macro substitution

The & macro function substitutes the contents of the specified variable into the command line. To use a macro in the middle of a word, it is necessary to end the variable name with a '.'. Any type of memory variable can be substituted as a macro.

subscript = 10
i10i = 5
? i&subscript.i
         5

Expression macro substitution

The & macro function can also substitute the result of an expression into the command line. The expression must be enclosed in round brackets.

subscript = "1"
i10i = 5
? i&(subscript + "0")i
         5

Shell command output substitution

Recital provides tight integration with the unix/linux command shell. The ` ... ` command sequence (backticks) can be used to run external shell commands that are piped together and to substitute the output into a Recital character string.

echo "The default directory is `pwd`"
echo "There are `ls -l *.dbf | wc -l` tables in this directory"