[daip] Re: passing parms back into AIPS

[Eric Greisen]

Bryan Butler writes:
 > 
 > eric,
 > 
 > is there a mechanism for tasks to pass parameters (adverbs)
 > back into AIPS?  e.g., i want, at the end of a particular
 > task, to pass back the offset derived from a u-v fit, in order
 > to set a clean window.  is it possible to do this?  in my
 > poking around, it seems that only verbs currently do this,
 > not tasks (e.g., IMSTAT sets PIXAVG, PIXSTD, etc...).  seems
 > like there could be a PTPARM subroutine which did this, as an
 > analog to GTPARM...
 > 
 > there are obvious advantages to being able to do this when trying
 > to do scripting (via PROCs and RUN files).
 > 

There has been discussion of this over the years.  I guess we could
make a code in the inputs file column n (where the show/tell etc codes
are) - of course it would have to be a big set of codes to allow all
the current ones + current ones passed and fetched + current ones not
passed but fetched.  Then the task would always run DOWAIT true. and
aips would have to parse the adverbs back.  In other words a lot of
work that we have avoided so far.  How important is this?

And at that point we would have lost the independence of tasks and
AIPS which we have.  Verbs are just subroutines of AIPS and so have
easy access to the adverbs.

Eric