Just curious. Why the > after commands?

[cvlr]

Why are statements like If and Let followed by> ? What was the design decision for that?

[Grovkillen]

It's to delimit the command from the command switches. Commonly used in programming languages, or at least variants of it.

[Marcus Tettmar]

It's a delimiter. But also it just evolved that way. The very first version of Macro Scheduler way back in 1997 didn't have an editor. At that stage no one envisaged how powerful it would become and it just had a simple command builder. So the ">" was just added between the command and the parameters to help visualise things. When we started making it possible to edit scripts and it slowly evolved into a language we needed backward compatibility and people were used to seeing it so we just left it in. Another reason is that our aim was that ordinary people would use it and it was never aimed only at developers, so we didn't force "type" and you can intermix variables and strings and you didn't need string delimiters. That means that spaces would have to be assumed to be part of a string. So we couldn't use a space as the delimiter like you might be used to in "real" programming languages. Of course we now have directives that let you override that behaviour but since that isn't the default and backwards compatibility is important to us, the familiar ">" is still there. So its there partly for historical reasons and partly for simplicity. Hope that helps.

[PepsiHog]

@Marcus,
Not that I will ever use it, but now you have me curious. What directives? And how would a user go about using these directives?

I like knowing everything about things I own. It's the knowing.

Thanks.

[Marcus Tettmar]

Try the help file

For starters see the "Ignoring Spaces" topic.

[PepsiHog]

I misunderstood what you were saying. You first were addressing the question about >. I thought you were addressing the same when you stated "We now have directives...."

PepsiHog