Chapter VI: ADVANCED EDITING

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Interpreters

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Electric has built in interpretive languages that provide great power in design. The TCL interpreter is a graphical user-interface language. The LISP interpreter implements a Scheme LISP dialect. On Macintosh systems, it is also possible to get Mathematica. Note, however, that these interpreters are not part of the standard GNU distribution and must be obtained separately from Electric Editor, Incorporated.

The Interpretive Language command of the Windows menu shows the language choices available: TCL..., LISP... and/or Mathematica... Once these commands are issued, you are in direct communication with the interpreter and may type arbitrary expressions. When done with an interpretive session, type ^D to return to Electric (hold the control key and type "D"). On Windows systems, type ESC.

Besides basic expressions in the language, it is possible to examine and modify the Electric database. Special language extensions exist for doing this. See the documents "Electric's TCL Interface", "Electric's Lisp Interface", and "Electric's Mathematica Interface" (available from Electric Editor, Incorporated) for more information about these extensions.

Another way to make use of the interpretive languages is to create attributes on Electric objects that are described with code. Using the Variables... command of the Info menu, you can create new attributes that are actually code. Change the "CODE" popup entry to "TCL", "LISP" or "Mathematica" and type the code in the "Value" field. The use of the Variables... dialog is beyond the scope of this manual, because it is essentially a debugging tool for examining the internal data structures of Electric.


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