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General Command Rules

1995 Version of ANSI (Equivalent to Current ISO Version) of Standard

8 Commands
8.1 General command rules

Every command starts with a commandword which dictates the syntax and interpretation of that command instance. commandwords differing only in the use of corresponding upper and lower case letters are equivalent. The standard contains the following commandwords:

    commandword::=

























B[REAK]
C[LOSE]
D[O]
E[LSE]
F[OR]
G[OTO]
H[ALT]
H[ANG]
I[F]
J[OB]
K[ILL]
L[OCK]
M[ERGE]
N[EW]
O[PEN]
Q[UIT]
R[EAD]
S[ET]
TC[OMMIT]
TRE[START]
TRO[LLBACK]
TS[TART]
U[SE]
V[IEW]
W[RITE]
X[ECUTE]
Z[unspecified]


























Unused commandwords other than those starting with the letter "Z" are reserved for future enhancement of the standard.

Any implementation of the language must be able to recognize both the abbreviated commandword (i.e., the character(s) to the left of the "[" in the list above) and the full spelling of each commandword. When two commands have a common abbreviated commandword, their argument syntax uniquely distinguishes them.

The formal definition of the syntax of command is a choice from among all of the individual command syntax definitions of 8.2.

    command::=




syntax of the BREAK command
syntax of the CLOSE command
...
syntax of the XECUTE command
syntax of the Z[unspecified] command





For all commands allowing multiple arguments, the form

commandword arg1, arg2, ... argn

is equivalent in execution to

commandword arg1 commandword arg2 ... commandword argn

Within a command, all expratoms are evaluated in a left-to-right order with all expratoms that occur to the left of the expratom being evaluated, including the complete resolution of any indirection, prior to the evaluation of that expratom, except as explicitly noted elsewhere in this document. The expratom is formed by the longest sequence of characters that satisfies the definition of expratom. (See 7.1 for a description of expratom).

An error condition occurs, with ecode="M11", when execution begins of any formalline unless that formalline has just been reached as a result of an exvar, an exfunc, a Job command jobargument, or a Do command doargument that contains an actuallist.

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Copyright © Standard Documents; 1977-2024 MUMPS Development Committee;
Copyright © Examples: 1995-2024 Ed de Moel;
Copyright © Annotations: 2003-2008 Jacquard Systems Research
Copyright © Annotations: 2008-2024 Ed de Moel.

This page most recently updated on 12-Sep-2014, 12:14:01.

For comments, contact Ed de Moel (demoel@jacquardsystems.com)