This tutorial provides essential information and examples for using athenaCL's interactive command-line Interpreter. This material is essential for understanding basic athenaCL operation and how to obtain help within the program.
Depending on your platform, there are a number of different ways to launch the athenaCL program and start the athenaCL Interpreter. For all platforms, using athenaCL requires installing (or finding) Python 2.6 (or better) on your system. Many advanced operating systems (UNIX-based operating systems including GNU/Linux and MacOS X) ship with Python installed.
For complete instructions on installing and launching athenaCL in each platform, please see the file "README.txt" included in the athenaCL distribution and in Appendix A.
After launching athenaCL, the user is presented with a text-based display in a terminal or Python-interactive window. The user is presented with the following initialization information:
Example 1-1. Initialization information
athenaCL 2.0.0 (on darwin via terminal)
Enter "cmd" to see all commands. For help enter "?".
Enter "c" for copyright, "w" for warranty, "r" for credits.
pi{}ti{} :: When starting up the Interpreter, athenaCL looks in the athenaCL directory for the "libATH" folder, and then various directories within the "libATH" folder. These directories contain essential files and must be present for the program to run. The athenaCL prompt "::" is preceded by information concerning the AthenaObject. This will be explained in greater detail below.