Programmer Guide/Introduction

This chapter contains a general introduction to the structure of the STx programming and execution environment.

Application Environment

The application environment contains all the data structures and functionallities which are available to the whole application.

Loaded Sourcefiles

All scripts, macros, classes and spu's must be loaded from the sourcefile before they can be executed or instantiated. All loaded sources are available to the whole application. Shell commands: LOAD sourcefiles UNLOAD sourcefiles LIST loaded sourcefiles and code objects

Active Shells

All running shells are registered in the application envrionment.

Global Variables

The application environment contains a global variable space, which can be accessed from the whole application. All name prefix character @ is used to address the global variable space. The following table shows some of the most important global variables.

name	description
@WORK	The full pathname of the working directory
@ROOT	the full pathname of the STx installation directory
@TEMPDIR	The full pathname of the directory for temporary files
@DATASETFILE	The full pathname of the active project file
@MASTER	The id of the master shell
@OSVER	The operating system version
@PROFILE	The full pathname of the workspace file