Entries in the statement line are interpreted as statements. For an overview of the F mode statements, see the section “Statements in F mode”. The EDT statement symbol (default value: @) does not have to be specified (except in the case of the @: statement).
Users can enter one or more statements (statement sequence) in the statement line. The individual statements must be separated by a semicolon (';'). Processing is aborted if an error occurs. An error message is output together with the unprocessed portion of the statement input including the invalid statement.
When the input has been processed correctly, the statement line is deleted from the screen output. The statement # or n# can be used to display the last entered statement or the nth last entered statement again so that it can be re-issued either in its original form or modified. In this case, at least one character must be overwritten, modified or added. Alternatively, the @SHIH statement can be used to output the buffer containing the statements most recently executed by EDT in work file 9 (see below).
The content of a statement line or the remainder of a line that is no longer required can be deleted with [LZF].
A semicolon is not interpreted as a statement separator in literals.
When @EDIT is used to switch to L mode in a statement string then any residual part of the statement sequence is not processed.
The maximum permitted statement length in F mode is smaller than in L mode due to the limitation imposed by the terminal. For more information, see the following section.
Statement line continuation
If, when the screen is sent, the last character in the statement line is not a NULL character, EDT assumes that the user needs a continuation area for input. In this case, a second line is made available provided that the work window is large enough so that at least one further data line can be output. EDT places the content of the statement line in the preceding screen line and the now empty statement line is provided as the continuation line. A maximum of two continuation lines can be provided. The maximum length of input is therefore 189 characters for a terminal with 80 columns or 345 for a terminal with 132 columns.
Treatment of NULL characters in the statement line
NULL characters at the end of the statement line are ignored. Before the input is analyzed, NULL characters in the statement sequence are converted into blanks.