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Create Your Own "Quick Pick Pocket Guide"
Jonathan E. Sisk

(Author's note: The file names and account names have changed since this article was written back in the early 1990's.)

Did you realize that the EPick account consists of a bunch of feature-rich Pick files? Have you ever bothered looking at the dictionary of the "ap.doc" file? Do you like articles that lead off with questions? If you answered "no" to more than one of these questions, then you might want to take a minute and at least scan the following ACCESS sentences. You could, in fact, produce the equivalent of one of my Pick Pocket Guides by investing a few minutes of your time. (Note that all of the following commands will only work if you have loaded the EPick account first!)

When we developed the Encyclopedia Pick and the EPick on-line documentation for Pick Systems, the first thing we did was take my old (generic) Pick Pocket Guide and create a database from it, creating attributes for the main details. Commands are primarily organized by "category", which is where they fall in the "big scheme of events". This first command will give you some idea of the scope of the categories offered:

:sort ap.doc by category break-on category "'l'" total nd (di

The "nd" dictionary item tells how many items are in a category. (For a hard-copy, add a "p" option after the "di" options.)

The next big organizational break consists of what kind of thing it is, which we call its "type":

:sort ap.doc by type break-on type "'l'" total nd (di

There are several great dictionary items in the dictionary of ap.doc (see the dictionary listing below), and with some minor additional tweaks to some of them, some pretty cool reports are possible.

Okay, so here is the command that will produce a simulated Pocket Guide:

:sort ap.doc by category by token heading "'l'AP.Doc category: 'acategory.head' 'j'Page 'pl'" roll-on category.hidden "'p'" tokenx2 type tersex2 syntax:2 footing "'l'Sorted by Category, then type, then token. 'jd'" tcl-supp (ip

Note that the following Dictionary Items from ap.doc are only the fields used in the above sentence. You may have to add some of the following items to the dictionary of ap.doc to make the above report work.

AC: 1 ID: category.head     TY: lx CW: 25  CORRELATIVE:  tap.doc.categories;x;;1
AC: 1 ID: category.hidden   TY: l  CW: 0  CORRELATIVE: tap.doc.categories;x;;1
AC: 2 ID: tokenx2           TY: t  CW: 48
AC: 3 ID: tersex2           TY: t  CW: 48
AC: 5 ID: syntax:2          TY: w  CW: 85 OUTPUT-CONVERSION: call process.syntax
AC: 23 ID: type             TY: lx CW: 15 INPUT-CONVERSION:  iap.doc.types;a1{vm}i CORRELATIVE: tap.doc.types;x;;1

Note that the "type" dictionary has a multi-valued "INPUT-CONVERSION" attribute.

Now that you know how to create your own hard-copy documentation, Please Don't! For the sake of Rain Forests everywhere (and I'm no tree-hugger), there is no reason to do this unless you absolutely have to! When you need help on a specific subject, assuming you have EPick loaded, you can simply type "help subject".

If you don't know what subject you want, you can create quick ACCESS reports using the existing dictionary items to find what you need.

Suppose, for example, that you just wanted to know what the available PICK/BASIC Debugger commands are. You could type something to the effect:

:sort ap.doc by token tokenx tersex with category "BASIC: Debugger" (i

Note that Pick Systems has changed a significant number of things in ap.doc since we delivered it a few years ago, so before you look for anything "by category", don't forget to get a listing of the "ap.doc.categories" file for the exact spelling. With a little old-fashioned trial-and-error, you can learn a lot from EPick.