Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Andrew Johnson <[email protected]> · Wed, 30 Jun 2004 16:28:44 -0500

The libCom macro library which is used to handle macro substitution in
almost all EPICS tools is extremely flexible in the characters which can
be used in the name of a macro. However this makes reimplementing the
macro behaviour in other languages such as Perl needlessly difficult to
do. I am considering restricting the characters which can be used in a
macro name to follow the same rules as C, unless I hear any objections.
Are there any systems currently installed which use macro names containing
characters other than 'A'-'Z', 'a'-'z', '0'-'9' or '_' ?
If you use macros like ${cell#1.2@5%:scan} with *any* EPICS tool, please
let me know ASAP. This also applies if you use non-ASCII characters in
macro names, for example accented characters in an international character
set. I do not wish to break existing systems and I'm willing to add some
characters to the above list, but I do need to restrict the character set
to something reasonable for my work on EPICS R3.15.
- Andrew
--
Dear God, I didn't think orange went with purple until I saw
the sunset you made last night.  That was really cool. - Caro

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System