NET/MASTER Network Control Language (NCL) Programmer's Guide

13 Interaction With Users and
Terminals
106160 Tandem Computers Incorporated 13–1
There are many ways to interact with an NCL process and many ways that an NCL
process can interact and communicate with users, terminals, and other NCL processes
by using commands, core statements, and verbs. The command, core statement, or
verb you select for interaction or communication depends on the task you need to
perform.
This section discusses the core statement and verbs that you can use from an NCL
process to interact and communicate with users and terminals. Table 13-1 summarizes
the core statement and verbs discussed in this section.
Table 13-1. Core Statement and Verbs Used for Interaction With Users and Terminals
Core Statement or Verb Description
CMDLINE verb Writes the specified text to an OCS command input line.
DELAY verb Suspends processing of an NCL process for a specified time.
PAUSE verb Suspends processing of an NCL process and waits for operator input.
SAY core statement Writes a message to a terminal or the current execution environment of an
NCL process.
WRITE verb Writes a message to a terminal, an NCL process, all monitor-class users,
a specified user, or the activity log.
Other commands, core statements, and verbs that you can use for interaction or
communication are the following:
CALL core statement, discussed in Section 6, “Procedures and Functions,” which
calls an NCL procedure and can pass parameters or variables to it
EXEC and START commands, discussed in Section 8, “Executing NCL
Procedures,” and Section 16, “Environments and Command Processing,” which
execute an NCL procedure and can pass parameters to it
FILE verbs, discussed in Section 12, “Working With Files,” which read from and
write to Enscribe files and Guardian processes
PANEL verb, discussed in Section 14, “Working With Panels,” which can display
information to users and allow input data to be passed to an NCL process
PSEND verbs, discussed in Section 15, “Working With Pathway Server Classes,”
which allow an NCL process to act as a PATHWAY requester to communicate
with existing Pathway server classes
INTQ command, discussed in Section 16, “Environments and Command
Processing,” which can pass data to an NCL process
INTREAD verb, which reads a message from a dependent processing
environment, and the INTCONT verb, which sends a message from an NCL
process, both of which are discussed in Section 16, “Environments and Command
Processing”