To access the value of a variable, you must precede the name with a dollar-sign. The set command has the property that in addition to setting the variable to the value, it also returns its value, converted to a string, and prints it on your console. In QMG, variables are used to stand for meshes and breps. It is often not desirable to convert them to string representation because the string representation can be huge if the mesh or brep is large. Another example of a command is the expr command that causes a string to be evaluated as an arithmetic expression, and the value of that expression is returned.
Square brackets invoke a function.
A final major syntactic feature is curly-braces. Unlike quotes, they can be nested. In addition, unlike quotes, they also prevent square brackets from being evaluated and dollar-sign substitution. Here is an example. The command in QMG to define a regular polygon is gmpolygon and to apply a transformation gmapply .