Programming SICS Macros

The SICS server has a built in macro language. This macro language is basically John Ousterhout's Tool Command Language Tcl. Tcl is described elsewhere. A sound knowledge of Tcl is required for programming SICS macros. The SICS macro language can be used for the following purposes:

Add hoc measurement procedures.
Trial measurement procedures.
Syntax adaptions to one's own favourite syntax.
Building of cmore complex commands from the SICS primitives.

The general procedure for defining a macro requires defining the macro in a new file, source this file from the configuration script and the use of the Publish command to make it available. New commands can best be defined as Tcl procedures, but the obTcl object oriented extension to Tcl is known to work as well. The SICS macro language allows to access:

Most Tcl commands.
All SICS commands.

In the following sections a few pecularities of the SICS macro system will be discussed.

Input/Output

It would be quite verbose and confusing for the user if all output from SICS commands called from a macro would appear on the screen during macro execution. Therefore all normal SICS output to a client is suppressed while executing a macro. Except error messages and warnings which will always be written to the client executing the macro. The output of a SICS command is available within the macro script through the normal Tcl mechanism as a return value. This allows for processing of SICS output within a macro. If the output to the client executing the macro is required this can be done with the ClientPut command, detailed in the user documantation.

Error Handling

Tcl has the feature that it aborts execution of a script when an error occurs. If a macro script needs to handle errors either from Tcl or from SICS commands this can be achieved by using the Tcl catch mechanism. A script can inquire the current interrupt value of the connection with the command GetInt. If a script can handle an error condition it may set the interrupt on the connection object with the SetInt command. The textual representations of interrupts for these commands are: continue, abortop, abortscan, abortbatch, halt, free, end.

Interacting with SICS within a Script

There exist a few commands which allow to inquire or manipulate SICS internals. Most of these commands are only available in macro scripts.

SICSType thing.: SICSType lets SICS find out if thing has some meaning within SICS. Possible return values are: DRIV for a drivable variable, COM for a SICS command, NUM for a numeric value and TEXT for anything else.
SICSBounds var newval: SICSBounds checks if newval violates the hardware or software limits of the variable var.
SetStatus newval: SetStatus sets the SICS status line to a new value. Possible values for newval are: Eager, UserWait, Count, NoBeam, Paused, Driving, Running, Scanning, Batch, Halt, Dead.
SICSStatus var: SICSStatus returns a integer value representing the current status of the object var. var must be a drivable or countable object. The integer code returned are defined in the SICS programmers documentation.

Currently it is not possible to define object interfaces from within the SICS macro language. For the notion of object interfaces see the SICS programmers documentation. This may be implemented in future when needed.