SPP Reference Manual
The SPP language is based on the Ratfor language. Ratfor, in turn, is based on Fortran, with extensions for structured control flow, etc. The lexical form, operators, and control flow constructs are identical to those provided by Ratfor. The major differences are the data types, the form of a procedure, the addition of inline strings and character constants, the use of square brackets for arrays, and the task statement. In addition, the SPP I/O facilities provided are quite different and are tailored
to the IRAF environment. The syntax of the SPP language is fairly straightforward and fundamentally similar to most other high-level languages. While it is based on the Ratfor language, there are elements of C as well as elements of Fortran. SPP is a preprocessed language. That is, there is no SPP compiler per se, but it is translated into another compilable language. In fact, SPP is first translated into Ratfor, which is processed into Fortran. The xc compiler performs all preprocessing, compilation, and linkage. This chapter describes the language in detail.
Chapter 2 describes the procedure libraries available to connect a program to the outside world, Chapter 4 describes how to compile an application as well as how it fits into the IRAF environment. Appendix B presents some basic examples and hints for writing real software.
- Lexical Form
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- Data Types
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- Declarations
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- Initialization
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- Macro Definitions
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- Control Flow
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- Expressions
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- Procedures
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- Program Structure
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- Generic Preprocessor
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