1. Spice Spice in Dyalog Document V1.06

2. Oct 2011 Spice Utilities Spice is a user command handler. Under V11 & V12 it uses an input area at the bottom of the screen to issue user defined commands using SALT. It can be initialized directly from SALT:

3. Oct 2011 Initializing Spice Spice can be started automatically when starting APL by setting the SALT registry key AddSPICE to ‘1’

4. Oct 2011 Initializing Spice The Spice input area can also be started automatically by using the function in the SALT workspace: )LOAD SALT enableSpice

5. Oct 2011 Initializing the Spice area in V12 The configuration menu:

6. Oct 2011 Initializing Spice in V12.1 There is no need to initialize the Spice input area in 12.1. The Spice user command handler is always available directly through the ] with 12.1. Simply use ] where you would use the input area, e.g. ]mycmd

7. Oct 2011 Spice Help To get a detailed list of all available commands enter ]?+ or ‘?+’ in the input area: ? + +

8. Oct 2011 Example of a custom Spice command: ffind Use “ffind string” to find a regular expression string in SALT folders, e.g.: ]ffind \babc>0$ Will find in SALT files where syntactic abc is greater than 0 at the end of a line.

9. Oct 2011 Using SALT commands in Spice All the SALT commands but New can be issued here, e.g.: ]save myclass file1 ]compare file1 -ver=4 ]list mine ]settings ]load myfile ]removeversions filex -v=<9

10. Oct 2011 How does Spice work? -Spice commands are kept in script files, like SALT. -Spice files have a.dyalog extension. -All Spice script files are kept by default in folder [Dyalog]\SALT\spice

11. Oct 2011 How does Spice work? Each script file contains a class or a namespace with a number of (presumably) related commands. For example a script/class could contain 1.a command to search text 2.a command to replace text

12. Oct 2011 How does Spice work? A script file MUST contain at least 3 public shared functions for the Spice handler: 1.A function 2.A function 3.A function It may contain other functions.

13. Oct 2011 How does Spice work? The function The function is niladic. It returns a list of as many namespaces as there are commands in the script file. E.g.: if there are 2 commands in the script file it returns 2 namespaces.

14. Oct 2011 How does Spice work? The function Each namespace returned by contains 4 variables; each one is a string: 1.Name: the name of the command 2.Group: the group the command belongs to 3.Desc: a short description 4.Parse: the parsing rules

15. Oct 2011 How does Spice work? The function The 4 variables: 1.Name: a single word, e.g. locate 2.Group: a single word, e.g. files 3.Desc: a sentence, e.g. Find string in files 4.Parse: a string describing the command syntax, e.g. 2 –exclude=

16. Oct 2011 How does Spice work? The function (example with 2 cmds) ∇ r←List :Access Shared Public r← ⎕ NS¨2 ⍴⊂ '' r.Name←'Locate' 'Replace' r.Group← ⊂ 'Files' r.Parse←'1' '2' r[1].Desc←'Find a string in files' r[2].Desc←'Replace a string by another' ∇

17. Oct 2011 How does Spice work? The function The function is ambivalent. Its arguments are a string naming the cmd to return detailed help for, e.g. Locate to the right and the help level to the left. It returns a string describing help for that command.

18. Oct 2011 How does Spice work? The function (example with 2 cmds) ∇ r←level Help Cmd :Access Shared Public r← ⊂ 'Shows where the string is found' r,← ⊂ 'Replace a string by another' r←r ⊃⍨ 'Locate' 'Replace' ⍳⊂ Command →lev↓0 r,← ⎕ av[4],'More help here…' ∇

19. Oct 2011 How does Spice work? The function The function is monadic. It takes 2 arguments: 1.a string naming the command to deal with, e.g. Locate 2.either a string or a namespace which is the argument to the command

20. Oct 2011 How does Spice work? The function (example with 2 cmds) ∇ r←Run(Cmd ca);ct;w :Access Shared Public r←0 0 ⍴ '' ⋄ ct← ⎕ SE.SALT.Load'Utils\fileUtils -noname' w←##.textUtils.splitOn ⍨⎕ SE.SALT.Settings'workdir' :Select Cmd :Case ‘Locate’ ⋄ w ct.showExpr¨ ⊂ ca.Argument :Case ‘Replace’ ⋄ w ct.replExpr¨ ⊂ ca.Argument :EndSelect ∇

21. Oct 2011 Example See script Spice\aSample.dyalog It contains 2 examples of Spice commands: 1.no parsing rules 2.with specific parsing rules

22. Oct 2011 Example The syntax is described in the help:

23. Oct 2011 Example If the syntax is wrong Spice will complain: No arguments!

24. Oct 2011 Example If the syntax is right Spice will do it:

25. Oct 2011 Spice command location When APL is installed the Spice commands' location is [Dyalog]\SALT\spice but you can change it. The SALT settings contain Spice’s commands location in cmddir: ]setting cmddir \my\own\user\cmds Will change the Spice/user commands folder to \my\own\user\cmds

26. Oct 2011 Special Spice command

27. Oct 2011 Final SPICE is a development tool. It can be used to store frequently used (and even less frequently used) user commands.

28. Oct 2011 Short Final More information can be found in the Spice document. Dyalog 2009