billms@caen.engin.umich.edu (Bill Mangione-Smith) (03/09/90)
I have a perl program that takes a data file and produces a plot in an annotated form of postscript that idraw can read in. At first there were a lot of cases in the input loop checking for various commands to set specific variables that controlled how the plots looked. Finally, out of frustration as the number of cases grew, I changed the syntax to: escape <string> When this occurs in the data file, the string is executed with a do command. This us usually used as: escape $maxx = 100; I can also execute calls to procedures. Unfortunately, I can't define procedures. This would be very useful, to define very short procedures to do spreadsheet like operations between two sets of data. Actually, I can define the procedures fine, I just cant invoke them. Is there any reason why this _cant_ work, or have others gotten something like this to work? Bill Mangione-Smith billms@dip.eecs.umich.edu