A fairly rich syntax will be made available. In prompt mode it would be annoying if the Astronomer sat through the whole xaxis family, and then wants to do the yaxis tree with the defaults now inherited from the xaxis tree. The programmer must leave the defaults in yaxis blank, and take the xaxis equivalent if none supplied in the yaxis equivalent. Executable within the Unix environment, that has the AIPS user interface. They come as program parameters and system parameters , though a third kind, the standard parameters 1.6 are internally defined by the user interface.
Programmers can bind standard parameters to program parameters at compile time.
The name of a parameter. A small excersize to let Khoros talk to a simple user interface is presented here. Currently most parameters are string parameters, except input and output files, which need to be labeled as such in the creation phase. Though AIPS programs lend themselves to the dataflow based model, they may not like their existing files to be overwritten. It is up to the user to define a fixed name.