NIME: NIfty Macro Expander

ICOOL input decks contain many input lines which are repeated over and over again. Furthermore, it is rather difficult to generate ICOOL input decks without making errors, due to the large quantities of data that must be entered. Also, ICOOL input syntax permits virtually no annotation in the form of comments, making it very hard to determine after the fact what a given ICOOL input deck represents.

NIME (NIfty Macro Expander), written by William M. Fawley, is an attempt to address these difficulties. It is a relatively simple Tcl/TK script which accepts a standard ASCII format file as input and then, after scanning the file for various macro definitions, expands any macros in text to produce a final output file. The basic goal of NIME is to allow a user to generate multiple blocks of text from repeated use of a relatively few numbers of heavily commented macros.

NIME, while targeted toward the generation and maintenance of ICOOL input decks, will actually work upon any ASCII file. Thus, NIME could prove useful, to give an example, for generating a series of input files for batch runs at NERSC in which only a few lines or variables might change from run to run.

Running NIME requires the Tcl (Tool command language) scripting language and its GUI counterpart Tk. These are both freely available for all major platforms from http://dev.scriptics.com/software/tcltk/.

Once you have Tcl/Tk installed, you need to obtain the components of NIME:

• nime.tk, the Tcl/Tk script which defines NIME,
• nime-manual-1.0.pdf, the NIME manual,
• test.nime a sample NIME macro file (optional).

J. Scott Berg <jsberg@bnl.gov>
2 March 2001.