Macros

Macros are a sequence of operations that are invoked with a single command. A macro serves as a convenient, and possibly temporary, alias for a single lengthier command (or sequence of commands) that needs to be executed frequently. More significantly, macros define complex, distributed signal processing applications. A macro might comprise thousands of NeXtMidas commands running on different machines.

A NeXtMidas macro has the extension .mm (Midas Macro). The file name extension is changed to allow NeXtMidas and X-Midas macros to coexist without name collisions. Since NeXtMidas translates macros on-the-fly, there are no translated .mcr files on disk as there are with X-Midas.

There are two types of macros:

The following subsections provide an introduction to NeXtMidas macro programming. Additional information is found in Graphics and Interoperability with X-Midas.