Table of Metacharacters

Many characters have special meaning in the NeXtMidas shell. This table lists their precedence (from highest to lowest) and function.

Character	Position	Function
&	end	Continues command to next line. In a macro, the line following is concatenated without its leading white space.
&&	end	No continuation, becomes literal final &
?	end	Prompts for command arguments. Does not function within macros.
$	start	Forces command to be executed in the shell that is running NeXtMidas (instead of a subshell). This is run from Java and does not affect your Unix or other shell.
$$	start	Forces command to operating system. This will affect your Unix or other shell.
! (bang)	start	Recalls recent commands.
! (bang)	anywhere	Designates inline commenting within a macro (except within doublequotes).
| (pipe)	between arguments	Used by commands such as PLOT to indicate a group of files. Also used by some commands to indicate multiple mask (flag) values.
/	after command name	Applies following switch to command.
, (comma)	between arguments	Separates arguments.
(space)	between arguments	Separates arguments.
^ (caret)	before name	Forces the substitution of the result or macro argument name following.
{ }	after a caret	Defines the range of characters to which the caret (^) applies.
{ }	anywhere	Defines the start and end to a NeXtMidas table definition (see Tables).
{ }	after filename	Treats characters in the brackets as file name qualifiers.
" "	around argument	Preserves characters bracketed by " " as a leteral string argument, leaving the white space and capitalization alone.
%	before macro name	Designates the macro as a user macro.
_ (underscore)	before file name	Designates the file name as the name of a pipe in a piped macro.
( )	after file name	Treats characters bracketed by ( ) as a file name trimmer.
( )	around expression	Groups expressions in an inline calculation.
[ ]	after a STARTMACRO argument	Defines the default value for that argument.
[ ]	within ASK prompt	Defines the default for the ASK prompt.
: (colon)	between type and name	Separates type from argument or result label.
: (colon)	in trim qualifier	Separates start from end.