Basic Language Format

The following changes have been made to the MAD input language in order to reduce the risk of ambiguity and to have an input language closer to well-known programming languages like Pascal, C, or C++:

Statement termination

All statements are now terminated by a semicolon (;). This removes the need for a continuation character when a statement is longer than one line.

Comments

Comments are now denoted as in C++, namely

• Text following with a double slash (//) is ignored up to the end of line (like in MAD-8 for the '!' character). Example:

  
  // This is a comment
  

• Comment can also be delimited by "/*" (begin) and "*/" (end). They may span several lines, and the begin/end markers may be nested (like in MAD-8 for COMMENT/ENDCOMMENT). Example:

  
  /* This is also a comment */
  

Line length

The input line length is no longer limited to 80 characters.

Keywords

All command and attribute keywords must be entered in full. Abbreviations are no longer accepted.

Attributes

On all commands, all attribute keywords are mandatory. This removes potential ambiguities between string values of attributes which could be mistaken for attribute names.

Object attributes

Command attributes are now written in the form

<object-name> -> <attribute-name>

which replaces the MAD-8 syntax

<object-name>[<attribute-name>]