Targeted Text statements

The AuditText, PrintText, and TraceText statements are abbreviated forms of the Text and Html Statements. They have the same effect as the Text Audit, Text Print, and Text Trace statements, respectively.

The AuditText, PrintText, and TraceText statements are available in Sirius Mods 7.2 and later.

The AuditText, PrintText, and AuditText keywords are simply a merging and reordering of Text Audit, Text Print, and Text Trace to emphasize the principle action. The lone difference between the former and latter forms is that former cannot be used if you want to include other Html/Text options, as in:

  text noexpr print The set is {2, 3, 5, 8, 13, ...}

As would be expected, AuditText sends its output to the Model 204 audit trail, PrintText sends its output to the current output stream (output terminal or use dataset), and TraceText sends its output to the current trace targets. These statements are the recommended/preferred alternatives to the traditional Audit, Print, and Trace statements. The reason they are recommend over these other statements is because they are more flexible and have more consistent behavior.

All text not inside of curly braces in an AuditText, PrintText, and TraceText statement is considered to be literal text. For example, the following will display “Suit the action to the word, the word to the action” on the primary output stream:

  printText Suit the action to the word, the word to the action

Values of variables and calculated values, can be placed inside of curly braces to that the value of what's inside the braces is displayed. For example, the following would display “%i = 22, %j = 33, %i * %j = 726”:

  %i = 22
  %j = 33
  printText %i = {%i}, %j = {%j}, %i * %j = {%i * %j}

Any valid expression is allowed inside the curly braces, including those that contain parentheses, $functions, and method calls. For example, the following would display “%i = 22, %j = 33, (%i + %j):toPower(3) = 166375”:

  %i = 22
  %j = 33
  printText %i = {%i}, %j = {%j}, (%i + %j):toPower(3) = {(%i + %j):toPower(3)}

If a single tilde (~) character is found inside curly braces, it must be followed (possibly with some intervening text) with an expression inside curly braces. The {~} would then be replaced with the literal contents of the following curly braces. For example, the following would display “%i = 22, %j = 33, (%i + %j):toPower(3) = 166375”:

  %i = 22
  %j = 33
  printText {~} = {%i}, {~} = {%j}, {~} = {(%i + %j):toPower(3)}

One common issue with the {~} syntax is that one might feel that a variable used as a subscript (perhaps for an ArrayList), should be replaced by its value. For example, if one had:

  b
  %i is float
  %j is float
  %al is arraylist of float
  %al = list(13, 17, 30)
  for %i from 1 to %al:count
     printText {~} = {%al(%i)}
  end for
  end

One might expect the following to be displayed:

  %al(1) = 13
  %al(2) = 17
  %al(3) = 30

But, instead, the following is displayed:

  %al(%i) = 13
  %al(%i) = 17
  %al(%i) = 30

One way to deal with this is to simply "manually" build the part before the value:

  for %i from 1 to %al:count
     printText %al({%i}) = {%al(%i)}
  end for

Another way, is to simply also show the subscript value:

  for %i from 1 to %al:count
     printText {~} = {%i}, {~} = {%al(%i)}
  end for

This ends up displaying:

  %i = 1, %al(%i) = 13
  %i = 2, %al(%i) = 17
  %i = 3, %al(%i) = 30