Re: Is this an unreported bug in EMC? (rant)

[Ray Henry <rehenry-at-up.net>]

At 01:17 AM 1/23/2000 -0500, Jon E. wrote:
<snip>
>Oh, one other thing I wanted, but I don't think has been done, is to be
>able to enter more than one block in MDI at one time, and then release
>all of them at once.  On the AB 7320, there is an end of block character,
>they use the '#', and a 'transmit' character, they use ']'.
>If you just want to move several axes at once, you could say :
>X1.23 Y4.56 Z-0.5 #]
>and all 3 axes would interpolate to that point.  But, if you entered :
>X1.23 # Y4.56 # z-0.5 #]
>it would move the X to 1.23, then move the Y to 4.56, then finally the
>Z axis would move.  I used this for cleaning up edges and such, with
>something like :
>Y-.04 # X10.5 F10 # Y0 F45 # X0 #]
>This would move in in Y, make a cutting pass in X, back Y away, and then
>rapidly return to X0.  With the ability to edit the MDI buffer, you could
just
>edit that first Y coordinate and re-execute the command until the surface
>has been fully cleaned up.  This seems like a relatively straightforward
>change.
>Any thoughts?  The # char should be able to be used as the separator, I don't
>think it has any use in RS-274D, except in comments.

I could add this to the mdi entry widget in the tkemc gui rather easily.
The only problem with tcltk is that # is used to identify a comment but
there is a workaround.  This might be easier that adding the # to the
interpreter itself but it would only work with the tkemc gui. 

Perhaps Fred or Tom can tell us if RS274NGC had any provision for multiple
sequential mdi commands with a delimiter between.  Or if we want to add one.

Comments on this?

Ray