DESL Update Chronology

Date	What changed
5/22/11	The "pubplot" command's "clip" option now allows a setting of "hide". For non-contour, non-polar and non-surface plots, the implication of this setting is to disallow any part of the plot's curve's symbols/lines - as if the drawing outside of the axes system is invisible.
4/10/11	The effective "path" string, longer than 16 characters, now properly handles embedded blanks.
7/16/10	The "print" command has had the available arguments of the "type" option expanded to include "nameonly". If "nameonly" follows "type" for a non-PostScript output, ONLY the first NAMEs record on the SIF file specified is written and is written such that the set of names is amenable to being pulled into another DESL command needing such a set of names. The form of the output is "names" followed on subsequent lines by a block of up to 200 names, five names per line. As many of these patterns will be written as it takes to completely present the set of names in the first NAMEs record.
11/30/08	The PC (XP) version of DESL was discovered to be inadvertently leaving two scratch files at the c:\Document and Settings\(user)\Local Settings\Temp location each time the "pubplot" command was executed in one DESL session. The accumulation of these files slows the DESL execution and, in the extreme case, prevents DESL from running altogether until the scratch files are manually eliminated. The scratch files in question are named as "FOR---.TMP". Any such files found can be removed when a DESL session is not running. The posted newer DESL version has been reparied.
8/25/08	A new desl command line option, "-ndi", can be specified to NOT use a DESLINIT file, if one exists in the current directory, upon desl invocation.
6/09/08	The "copy" command's function has been repaired to agree with implied documentation. The "all" and variable renames via the LHS = RHS type syntax will now work as expected.
4/30/07	The "translate" command's function has been enhanced to allow CSV/BSV/TSV type ASCII files being created to use the "mapfile" translation utility to create files with variable names of up to 16 characters. (See the mapfile translate option.)
1/01/07	The "equation" command's means of defining a table (see tabfile option) has been extended to be able to use predefined lists to supply the values to a one or two dimensional table.
8/28/06	The "diff" command has had a new option defined: "ratio". If this option is specified instead of using a difference between two values as the basis of comparison the ration of those values will be used and the associated tolerance is the absolute value of the difference from a ratio value of 1.0 that will flag an "out of tolerance" situation.
3/25/06	The "print" command If it is desired that a variable name be specified that would look to DESL as if it was a format specification, then a substitution of a semicolon for a period can be made in the specified name. The switch back to a period will be made by DESL before the printing occurs. Example Use F6;3 to have the variable F6.3 printed.
6/28/05	The register names formerly begun with an asterisk can now alternately be started with the pound sign (#). Using the starting pound sign can serve to avoid the inability of the asterisk-begun register names from being able to be used in text strings that are specified, such as for pubplot, within a question-mark delimted string. In that case, the special syntax used to include the value of a SIF variable also uses delimiting asterisks and conflicts with register names that use the begining asterisk.
5/25/05	The "pubplot" axes attributes, which could previously only be appropriated affected simultaneously with respect to BOTH the X- and Y-axes by the "oldlimits" option, can now also be affected in the same manner individually on the X- and Y-axis, respectively, by the "oldlimitsx" and "oldlimitsy options.
5/22/05	The "extra" capability has been modified such that it can do 1- or 2-dimensional table-based interpolation and matching. The "-x" argument to extra has also been more fully described.
8/27/04	The "pp" command has been modified such that Encapsulated PostScript files (EPSF) can be imported into the first page of a pp PostScript file.
8/14/04	The "eqn" command has been modified such that tables can be used in an extrapolation mode unless the "noextrap" option is specified.
4/12/04	The "diff" command has been modified such that the "dnames" and "dnameset" options can define up to 5000 names. Limit was previously 2000.
11/17/03	The "diff" command has been modified such that when BOTH of the corresponding values in the two files being "diffed" are 0.0 the effective difference is also 0. or 0%.
9/28/03	The "spawn" command has been corrected such that the "at" keyword works as advertized. Previously, the previous value of the "at" variable was set to the FIRST record in the set of records instead of its value in the most immediate record.
7/17/03	The "create" command has been modified to include any comment lines that were encountered during its creation. Previously, these comment lines, along with all others, were filtered out by the DESL input processor.
5/20/03	The new "diff" command has been added. A report can now be generated that compares the differences between values of variables from two files against specified or impied tolerances.
5/13/03	The "cleanup" command will now remove up to 2000 files produced in the session whose fates are "remove at cleanup".
4/14/03	The "translate" command will now not include the variable names line(s) in files written as "tsv", "bsv" or "csv" type ASCII files if the "nonames" option is specified. Previously, only when the "ffsif" ASCII format was being written would the "nonames" have the intended effect. The learn command has been corrected to include the determined coefficients on a new sif file being created regardless of the value of the "report" option. The extra DESL functionality has been extended to include two new options : -last and -x . The "-last" option will cause the user's code to be called one more time after each SIF file is processed. When the user's code would be entered the last time per file the special two SIF variables RECCOUNT and FILCOUNT can be extracted via "sget" to yield, respectively, the sequence number of the file whose processing has just ended and the number of records that were on the SIF and NOT voided. See examples of the use of "extra". The pubplot DESL has been corrected to ignore more than 20 "psort" arguments per subplot. The implementation of the stop (s) and stopn (sn) DESL commands have been modified such that they each will stop DESL even when execution has been from within an alternate input file and/or macro. Previously the DESL execution could only merely revert to the interactive prompt at the encounter of the "stop" and "stopn" commands.
2/20/03	The precedence that sould exist when "if" type commands are used within "create" blocks, or vice versa, is now handled properly. The "translate" command's documentation now reflects the interchangeability of binary SIF files. The "constant" option was deprecated in the "merge" command. The same capability still exists in the stack command.
2/4/03	A problem wherein the contents of a file "created" within a macro could be truncated to segments of no more than 16 characters was repaired. Now lines being added to a "created" file need not be broken into smaller sections to adhere to the previous character limit. A syntax problem reported when using continuation lines in a macro was repaired.
1/14/03	A minor problem regarding continuation lines within a macro was fixed.
12/30/02	The ability of the "pubplot" command's "symbols" option to cause an outlined solid symbol to be drawn, when the symbol number has 2000 added to its value, has been corrected to behave as advertized. Minor problems in the "equation" and the "translate" DESL commands were corrected. Previously, the setting of the user name register number 19 (*N19) could have caused an error when either of those two functions were used. The problem would have manifested itself in the form of a DESL session that would have taken control away from the user, seemingly in an infinite waiting state, having to be terminated abnormally by the user.
11/25/02	The "create" command has been extended to include the possibility to have the file being produced or appended to be composed of incoming lines either as individual lines or as concatenated lines. Two new inline directives (!concat and !verbatim) control this action.
11/13/02	The "spawn" command has been corrected with respect to being able to correctly do secondary sorting on multiple files.
11/13/02	The "register" command has been corrected for Linux and Mac-OSX systems to properly allow the use of registers above 20. The DESL "macro" use capability has been corrected for Linux and Mac-OSX systems to operate properly regardless of whether the macros are used in an interactive or batch configuration.
11/4/02	The "spawn" command has been modified to correct an error with respect to the number of new files permitted to be created. Errorneously, within SPAWN, the upper limit of the number of files able to be created in a DESL session was 500. It has now been revised to be correct and be 2000.
10/31/02	The "pubplot" command had its documentation altered with respect to the "reset" and "scale" options to stress the point that the plot's scale ought not to be changed from its initial setting.
8/2/02	The "copy" command was repaired with respect to the ability to compute a standard deviation when also doing an average with more than the number of available records. In this case the actual number of records is used and only a single record is included in the new file. The problem had been that when this situation occurred, when there were less available records to average (and find the stddev for) than were desired, an incorrect equation was being used for the standard deviation. Instead of using the quantity (N-1) in the denominator, in effect, N was being used, where N is the number of available records.
7/18/02	The "cleanup" and "pubplot" commands were repaired with respect to the ability to use a "list" of files with the "files" and/or "xfiles" options via the "<list_name" construct.
5/23/02	The DESL software includes substantial changes. The changes that have taken place are : The Mac OS-X system and HP (Unix) systems are now supported. SIF file names as can be specified following the "files", "newfiles" and "newfilex" options for many DESL commands can now accept strings that are up to 256 characters long. Any file name string that is longer than 16 characters, however, must be enclosed in the standard question mark characters. If a path is to be used as a "files" filename prefix the total number of characters for a file name string is 256. There are now more User registers. Previously there were 10 User and 10 System registers. In this version of DESL there are 10 System registers and 89 User registers. **************** NOTE : The organization of the registers has changed. Previously the first 10 registers were the User registers and the last 10 registers were the System registers. Now the first 10 registers are the System registers and the next 89 registers are the User registers. **************** A session that was held via the "hold" command, prior to this DESL version, cannot be continued via the "continue" command. The number of permitted table definitions allowable in the "equation" command has increased from 20 to 200. The number of allowable table references from the equations has increased from 100 to 200. The associated allowable total number of table values has increased from 2000 to 20000. The number of permitted data point in all curves to be plotted in up to 20 curves has increased from 5000 to 50000. The "hzero" and "vzero" pubplot options can cause lines to be drawn that are a color other than black. The "spawn" command's "newforms" and "newformx" can each be followed by up to 20 explicit or implicit file name parts. The previous limit was 10.
2/11/02	The DESL stack command was modified to correct a situation which could arise when consecutive "stack" operations occurred in a DESL sequence in which a specific set of named SIF variables was indicated by "names".
1/29/02	The DESL log command was modified to not create a log file at all if the number of lines written to it at the end of the DESL session is less than 5.
1/08/02	A Linux (Red Hat release 6.1-1, kernel 2.2.14-12) version of DESL is now available.
1/07/02	The "pubplot" command was enhanced with the ability to "reassociate" some aspects of the curves to be plotted. The new option is " reassociate ".
11/30/01	The "list" command was enhanced with the ability to include existing lists of files via the "<file_list" construct.
10/25/01	The "sum" option was added to the "merge" command such that two data sets could be added rather than subtracted during a "delta" operation.
8/24/01	The "filesuffix" command was added to provided the user the ability to imply a custom file suffix. This suffix can be composed of a combination of literal strings and/or some part of the DESL process id (pid) number.
8/9/01	The "pubplot" command's "symbols" option has a correction. Previous to 8/9/01 the advertised action caused by the use of a symbol number > 1000 was not happening fully. The plotted symbols were NOT drawn properly.
5/18/01	The "translate" command has a new option : "mapfile". The "mapfile" option allows the user to specify a file containing the internal/external variable name correspondence. THe dominant use for a mapfile is to deal with external ASCII files that have one of the required SIF-equivalent structures, but has one or more variable names that is longer than the allowable 8 characters - a rule under which internal, binary SIF files must live.
5/16/01	The "files"/"newfiles"/"newfilex" options capability expanded to include implicit inclusion of list entries. The "files", "newfiles" and "newfilex" options, available for many commands, now includes the ability to have previously defined list items included in the file names by use of the special {...} type sequence in the specified file names. This new capability extends the "thru"-type use to, only applicable to the end of strings, to any portions of a file name string.
5/15/01	Additional capability added to "path" command. The path command has had additional functionality added to its capability. Now, the special string last can be specified in lieu of a path number when clearing a path.
4/11/01	The use of the DESL "copy" command's "count" option has been clarified. The copy command's "count" option can be used to force the creation or overstoring of the variable "dxrecord". The value "dxrecord" will, in the end, be the number of DATA records that survive any conditional filtering that may be in effect. However, since "dxrecord" can, itself, be included in a condition being used with "copy", an intermediate value of "dxrecord" (before filters are applied) will be the total number of DATA records that are encountered; i.e., filtering could reduce the value being stored, in the end, into "dxrecord".
4/10/01	A new command was added to the repertoire of DESL commands : autopathfile. autopathfile (abbreviation, ap) will cause a named file to be used either before or after a standard pathfile type file during the execution of a DESL command. An autopathfile file name so specified is available globally to all DESL commands. There are on-the-fly editing capabilities such that an autopathfile file can be tailored to any changing needs. Like the "pathfile" path file that can already be used per command, this new global capability allows the translation of an up-to-16-character path to an up-to-64-character pathR, yielding an up-to-80-character file name.
3/30/01	A new command was added to the repertoire of DESL commands : autoread. autoread (abbreviation, ar) will cause a named file to be established as a global "readsn" file to be checked at the beginning of the interpretation of each DESL command's input as if the string, "readsn FILE SECTION_NAME" had been entered as the first part of the command's input. The state of this type file being active or inactive can also be controlled.
3/27/01	DESL's use of a void (or keep) file in a COPY function in an input stream was possibly affecting subsequent uses of the COPY command in which there were global or file-specific conditions specified. A warning of "no record satisfying the conditions" would have been issued, however, warning of the situation.
3/22/01	DESL's counting of consecutive blank lines in the input stream was incorrect in some situations. This has been repaired.
3/14/01	An error in DESL which prevented macro continuation lines from being properly process when inside of a DO or WHILE loop was repaired.
3/6/01	An error in the plotting code related to merged keys could have been responsible for spurrious locations of parts of a merged key for columns beyond the 10th column. This problem has been corrected.
11/9/00	Number of allowable file-specific conditions increased to 20. The number of allowable file-specific conditions was increased to 20 in the code for all applicable DESL commands. to match the advertized documentation limit. The number of allowable global conditions is still 10.
11/3/00	DESL copy command's stddev option documentation expanded.
9/27/00	DESL pubplot command's import option modified. Problem with import and its placement of ascii files with leading blanks fixed. New associated documentation.
9/26/00	DESL extra.o(bj) file modified. Now there are two new variables written to the SIF file : filcount and reccount. filcount has values from 1 to the number of files to be processed, being incremented by one as each new file is processed. reccount has values from 1 to the number of DATA records being processed per file, being incremented by one as each new DATA record, successfully passing through any active global or file-specific conditions, is processed.
8/11/00	PC's DESL cleanup routine modified. Unix version not affected. The cleanup command's code that actually eliminated files had a bug. Files were reported as being eliminated, but were not.
8/8/00	DESL plotting routine modified. The pubplot command's code implementing the ability to use the psave and prestore options has been repaired. Previously, if the DESL pubplot function was executed more than once in a session with at least one psave/presotre in its input a program counter was not being reinitialized properly.
8/8/00	DESL input routine modified. A problem that surfaced in conjunction with the use of the do DESL command has been solved. The do command causes a buffering of subsequent input to a file for use until a corresponding enddo is encountered. Before the problem fix, this buffering with lines that contained more than 20 blank-delimited items could have caused the code to abort. The problem was found while running DESL on the Solaris platform. The copy command's code implementing the vfile/vfilen voiding options was modified such that all of the SIF records are available to the voiding process, even if a subset of variables has been specified via the names option.
8/7/00	The DESL print function modified. The "title" option for the print command was corrected to respond properly to the inclusion of the *file* construct.
5/10/00	The new DESL function statistics was usable but incomplete. "statistics" has unconnected "treatment", "stats" options. Works like "learn" except that variables are "coded" internally before calculations and uncoded before report/additions to SIF. Increases accuracy of matrix calculations. Learn uses a simpler normalization scheme which nontheless seems to work well except in extreme examples (large natural variable value differences). This function will eventually contain all of the "learn" functionality and be able to calculate many standard statistical parameters including the calculation of ANOVA results.
4/14/00	The new DESL function statistics was started to be built. This function will eventually contain all of the "learn" functionality and be able to calculate many standard statistical parameters including the calculation of ANOVA results.
4/11/00	A consulting service has been started to aid in user production of executables from their Fortran source and the extra procedure.
4/11/00	The stack command was modified to allow the advertised 3500 names. The erroneous previous limit had been 200.
4/7/00	HyperDAS officially renamed DESL. Removed the C language code from DESL. There were file-oriented problems associated with the Fit command which affected its use in a situation in which the values of the independent variable were pulled from the first file being fit.
2/14/00	Modified the input routine used by the Translate command such that an ASCII numeric string of up to 32 characters can be correctly interpreted as a single precision number.
10/29/99	Added verbage to the Macro documentation to clarify the situation in which macros need to contain long strings.
10/29/99	Made changes in DESL plotting code such that pagination PostScript directives are produced correctly over sequentinal uses of the "pp" command in a DESL session.
9/7/99	Modified DESL documentation and functionality regarding the setting of the password (+ date). Only when the password is set from other than the environment variable DESLPW does the current date have to follow the password, and then only when DESL is running in the demo mode.
8/2/99	Modified DESL native line-editor such that its internal name, "Deditor", is consistent in the system.