Scripting Guide - SAS

Chapter 8 Programming Methods 231
Functions that Communicate with Users
The sequence \!N inserts the line breaking characters that are appropriate for the host environment. For an
explanation of the three line breaking escape sequences, see “Double Quotes,” p. 72 in the “JSL Building
Blocks” chapter.
Send information to the User
Beep
Speak
Caption
Beep causes the user’s computer to make an alert sound.
Speak reads text aloud. On Macintosh, Speak has one Boolean option, Wait, to specify whether JMP
should wait for speaking to finish before proceeding with the next step. The default is not to wait, and you
need to issue Wait(1) each time. For example, here is a script certain to drive anybody crazy. With
Wait(1), you probably want to interrupt execution before too long. If you change it to Wait(0), the
iterations proceed faster than the speaking possibly can and the result sounds strange. On Windows, you
can use a Wait(n) command to accomplish the same effect.
for(i=99,i>0,i--,
speak(wait(1),char(i)||" bottles of beer on the wall, "
||char(i)||" bottles of beer; "
||"if one of those bottles should happen to fall, "
||char(i-1)||" bottles of beer on the wall. ")
A more practical example has JMP announce the time every sixty seconds:
// Time Announcer
script = expr(
tod = mod(today(),indays(1));
hr = floor(tod/inHours(1));
min = floor(mod(tod,inHours(1))/60);
timeText = "time, " || char(hr) || " " || char(min);
text = Long Date(today()) || ", " ||timeText;
speak(text);
);
script;
show(text);
schedule(60,script);
// seconds before next script
You might use a similar technique to have JMP alert an operator that a process has gone out of control.
Caption brings up a small window with a message to the viewer. Captions are a way to annotate
demonstrations without adding superfluous objects to results windows. The first argument is an optional
{x,y} screen location given in pixels from the upper left; the second argument is the text for the window. If
the location argument is omitted, windows appear in the upper left corner.