File handling and utilities
Tony Swan, Robert S. Gilchrist, Malcolm Bradley, Mike Clarke, Peter Green, Allan Reese, John Hinde, Andrew Stalewski, Carl O’brien · 1993
Abstract GLIM has facilities for inputting statements and data from external files and similarly output can be directed to a file to provide hard copy output. These are accessed via secondary input and secondary output channels. Certain channels are automatically available to the user. One of these is for the transcript file which, by default, is a copy of everything that appears on the screen during an interactive session, including both input and output. Another is for the journal file which is a record of the GLIM statements input by the user during a session. This can be ‘replayed’ to reproduce a GLIM session. The user has control over what should be automatically stored in these files (see [4.3.1]). A third file which is available for input by the user is the macro library. This contains tried and tested macros which provide a valuable extension to the facilities available in GLIM [Appendix A]. There are also facilities for the user to save (to a dump file) the GLIM session in its current state and subsequently restart it at a later time, thus allowing an analysis to be spread over more than one session.