KEDIT Macro Language Enhancements

Several enhancements have been made to the KEXX macro language. The changes are summarized here.

Instructions

• New or enhanced KEXX instructions include SELECT, SIGNAL label, SIGNAL ON|OFF condition, CALL ON|OFF condition, and PROCEDURE EXPOSE.

• In previous versions of KEXX, instructions processed by INTERPRET could not CALL internal routines or invoke internal routines as functions. This limitation has been removed.

Built-in functions

• The REXX functions B2X(), CONDITION(), ERRORTEXT(), SOURCELINE(), SYMBOL(), TRACE(), VALUE(), and X2B() are now supported.

• The new COUNTSTR() function counts the number of occurrences of one string in another, and the CHANGESTR() function lets you replace these occurrences with a different string.

External routines

KEXX now supports calls to external routines. That is, with the CALL instruction and with function invocations, you can call a separate KEXX macro as a subroutine. In the past, you could only invoke separate KEXX macros via the MACRO instruction, but this method provided no convenient way to return a result string from the external macro to the calling macro.

Binary strings

KEXX now supports binary strings, specified as a series of binary digits (that is, 0 or 1) followed by an uppercase or lowercase B, for example

'11011'b