Library Routines

A large number of library routines are provided. Some are written in low-level inline assembly, and some are written hll. Most are automatically included as and when needed, but some require an explicit include statement before they can be used. In the latter case, the appropriate include file is noted in the "Definition" part of the description. Of course an include file need only be included once in your program. The editor displays in magenta those routines that are built into the interpreter, and require no include file. You can override the definition of these built-in routines by defining your own routine with the same name. You will get a suppressible warning if you do this.

Routines are documented using an explicit type declaration style syntax. For example where you see a definition such as
integer i = length(sequence s)
You should understand that denotes actual statements which look more like:
i = length(s)
The examples, when provided, often give a clearer illustration of the required syntax than the formal definition at the start.

Some routines are not available on all platforms (specifically message_box and text_rows only, though instance and cursor do nothing useful on Linux). This is noted with "Platform: WINDOWS" or "Platform: Linux" in the description of the routine, and with (WINDOWS) or (Linux) in some other places.

A run-time error message will usually result if an illegal argument value is passed to any of these routines.