B Functional Developer Console Environment

B.3 Using console-dylan interactively

The interactive mode of the console environment allows you to carry out multiple development tasks over a period of time without having to restart the console environment each time. To start the console environment in interactive mode, double-click console-dylan.exe in the bin folder of your Dylan installation, or enter console-dylan without any arguments at an MS-DOS prompt. For example:

MS-DOS> console-dylan
  Functional Developer(TM) ...
  Version ...
  Copyright (c) 1999-2000, Functional Objects, Inc. 
  All rights reserved.

>

Working at the prompt within the Dylan console environment is equivalent to working in the interactor in the regular Functional Developer development environment (in other words, in the interaction pane in the Debugger).

Console environment commands must be preceded by a colon, such as :start. You can find a list of command groups by entering the command :help at the command line. The command groups in the console environment are:

Table B.2
Command Group	Description
`BASIC`	basic commands
`BREAKPOINTS`	breakpoint commands
`BROWSING`	browsing commands
`BUILD`	project building commands
`DEBUGGING`	debugging commands
`MEMORY`	memory viewing commands
`PROJECT`	project commands
`PROPERTY`	property handling commands
`REPORTS`	report commands
`STACK`	stack commands
`SYSTEM`	operating system commands

You can also use :help command-name to view the full documentation of a command. We can see the kind of information available by looking at the help entry for the :help command:

> :help help Usage: :HELP [options*] [command]

If specified with no arguments, HELP shows a list of all commands with a one line description. Help can also show documentation for a command group, a command or a command property if the /group, /command or /property options are specified.

Arguments:

COMMAND - the command to describe

Options:

GROUP - the command group to describe PROPERTY - the property to describe

Therefore, to find out what commands exist within the STACK command group, type:

> :help /group stack

STACK:

Commands to handle an application's stack.

Commands: :BACKTRACE displays the stack backtrace :BOTTOM selects the bottom stack frame :DOWN selects a frame further down the stack :TOP selects the top stack frame :UP selects a frame further up the stack

Properties: FRAME Current stack frame

For full documentation on a command, use: HELP /COMMAND command.

Then, to examine the :DOWN command, type:

> :help down Usage: :DOWN [count]

Selects a frame further down the stack.

Arguments: COUNT - number of frames to move down

To exit the console environment, use the command :exit.