Agilent Technologies Agilent 86120C manual Examples of Short Forms, Equivalent Short Form

Programming

Reviewing SCPI Syntax Rules

OUTPUT 720;”:MEAS:SCAL:POW? MAX”

Programs written in long form are easily read and are almost self- doc- umenting. Using short form commands conserves the amount of con- troller memory needed for program storage and reduces the amount of I/O activity.

The rules for creating short forms from the long form is as follows:

The mnemonic is the first four characters of the keyword unless the fourth character is a vowel, in which case the mnemonic is the first three characters of the keyword.

This rule is not used if the length of the keyword is exactly four char- acters.

Table 3-8. Examples of Short Forms

Long Form	Equivalent Short Form
ROUTE	ROUT
LAYER	LAY
SYSTEM	SYST
ERROR	ERR

You can use upper or lowercase letters

Program headers can be sent using any combination of uppercase or lowercase ASCII characters. Instrument responses, however, are always returned in uppercase.

Combine commands in the same subsystem

You can combine commands from the same subsystem provided that they are both on the same level in the subsystem’s hierarchy. Simply separate the commands with a semi- colon (;). For example, the follow- ing two lines,

OUTPUT 720;”:CALC2:PEXC 12”

OUTPUT 720;”:CALC2:PTHR 20”

can be combined into one line:

OUTPUT 720;”:CALC2:PEXC 12;PTHR 20”

The semicolon separates the two functions.

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