DMDX Help.
Keywords.
With the advent of 32 bit flat memory many of the traditional Dmastr limitations serve no purpose but to limit, the single character parameter and item switches being a prime example. While DMDX will correctly parse the single character versions enhanced keywords have been added. The general format of a keyword is a token and a value enclosed in angle brackets, for example:
<scramble 8>
White space must separate the keyword's token from the keyword's value (unlike traditional Dmastr where white space was optional) and the number of characters in either the token or the value should not exceed 256 characters. Tokens are case insensitive.
Additionally if the first character of a keyword is a ! then the whole keyword
becomes a comment and is ignored by the rest of DMDX's parsers -- which is handy
for something like <BranchDiagnostics> that you
only want active when debugging an item file but might want to turn back on a
later date so you can just throw a ! in at the start (so
<!BranchDiagnostics>) to temporarily disable
it.
In the following keyword definitions N denotes a decimal integer numeric value, H denotes a hexadecimal integer numeric value, F a floating point numeric value, C a single character, text
or option denotes some string value and expression some infix notation expression (See <SetCounter>). Square brackets denote an optional value. In general commas (recommended) or white space (not recommended and possibly not supported everywhere) can be used to separate multiple Ns. Although keywords are case insensitive I like to capitalize the beginnings of words a la Win32 function calls, for example BranchIfNoResponse. Most keywords have a terse synonym, some of them are the same as the original Dmastr syntax (which is still usable, see Item Files) when the original letter bore some relationship to the function, others are new. Either is usable, it just depends how readable you want the item file to be.