I have on my possession the PDFs that describe the robot language, there's the basic outline, the socket communication, command reference, usertask and also the applicable parts of the other manuals, mostly concerning movement commands. I have access to pretty much everything below integrator level what ever the vendors have published.
But are there other resources, specifically, some english language Internet ones on SLIM? Has anyone had a chance to see the defining standard of SLIM, JIS B 8439:1992? Is it more comprehensible compared to the vendor PDFs and if so, do the vendors actually implement something that would be in the JIS standard but was overlooked in the official documentation?
Specifically, things I'd like to know:
- Are there any sort of escapement sequences in the string literals? What is the exact syntax for them? I have mucked around some, and it seems that the only way to input " -sign is to write " + Chr$(&H22) + "
- Is there a shorthand for array literals, other than assigning each cell indivitually? I would not mind this one so much wasn't there the 999 line length limit for the programs.
- Shorthand to assing a value on the same line as the Dim-variables are defined?
UserProc's are almost unusable due the parameter limit and the requirement for the parameters to be registers. Just as well I could the use those registers directly from a "GoSub" -type of subprobram.
Can you place string literals into INCLUDE -files; of course not, that would be way too convenient. For no apparent reason any line with " is ignored...
Also, no nested [ ]'s. And there was I so clever when I thought "Aha, I shall define all my registers in an include file in the following manner i_Status,V%[004_PREFIX+1] and have the prefixes defined in a separate file! This was nice all they way until I actually wanted to use the index syntax within the program itself, found out it is not nestable.
Can have nested functions, can't have nested functions that take more than one arguments.
Phooey, the welding stuff is very nice, but clean this language is not.