On this page:
The Input Prompt, Calculation Lines, Command Lines, Comment Lines.
When you start Hypatia, or whenever Hypatia has displayed a result or a message, you see a question mark -- this is the input prompt. What you type will be processed after you have pressed the ENTER key.
The length of the input line is limited by the width of the screen. Only standard ASCII characters (character codes < 128) can be written. Except in comment lines (see below), everything you type will be converted to lower case characters.
There are three kinds of input lines:
- Calculation lines
- Command lines
- Comment lines
To exit Hypatia, use any of the commands Q or QUIT, or close the console window.
Question marks and equal signs at the beginnings of lines in this documentation are displayed by Hypatia as input prompts and to indicate calculation results. Do not type them!
Hypatia considers any line that starts with a number, a variable or a constant to be a mathematical expression that it will try to calculate.
Hypatia will display the result in the next line, preceded by an equal sign, and then prompt for the next input line.
If Hypatia cannot perform the calculation, you will get an error message that will try to explain the problem.
Numbers can be written in several formats: decimal, hexadecimal, or binary -- see page Writing Numbers in chapter "Numbers".
A command line in Hypatia (not to be confused with an operating system's command line) is a line that starts with a command.
Hypatia considers everything at the beginning of a line to be a command that isn't either a number, a constant, a variable, or the comment symbol #.
If Hypatia doesn't recognize the command, you will get an error message.
Lines that begin with "$myvar =" and "@ude =" (assigning a value to a variable or assigning content to a user defined element) are commands, too. This will be discussed on page Setting Variables in chapter "Variables" and on page User-Defined Elements in chapter "Insert Files and User Defined Elements".
Any line that begins with the hash sign # is a comment line.
When you enter a comment line, nothing happens -- only if you have turned logging on (see page Hypatia's Files in this chapter), then this comment line will be written to the log file.
More important is the use of comment lines in scripts -- see page Comments in chapter "Scripts".
While in calculation lines and command lines everything you type is converted to lower case, in comment lines upper case characters are preserved.
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