[chimerax-users] Simple programming features in ChimeraX command language?

[Eric Pettersen]

Hi Oli,
	First off, thanks for all the suggestions and feedback — we love it.  Keep it coming (this applies to everyone!).  The sticking point of course is though ChimeraX does a lot of things that Chimera doesn’t, the converse is also true:  Chimera does a lot of things that ChimeraX doesn’t, and we are working hard to close that gap.  So working on suggestions from you and others has to be prioritized and slotted into that process.  So some suggestions may get incorporated quickly while others “wait their turn” — it doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten them.
	As for this specific suggestion for simple programming-like language features, it could be the hardest one for us to do.  It really it something much easier to integrate if it is part of your original design rather than a later addition.  The command line parsing is already quite complex to allow non-core bundles to add commands and to add keywords to the open and save commands.  There was no provision for multi-line command constructs.  Though I could be overlooking some means of implementing this without a major overhaul of the command parsing — I am not the true expert on the parser (that would be Greg Couch).
	I guess it might be possible to implement some kind of preprocessor that looks at the original input with it’s simple logic constructs, and executes it and generates a series of one-line commands that would be executed by the “real” command processor.  Would it be a problem if these constructs were only available if you had opened a script file, rather than directly typing them?

—Eric

	Eric Pettersen
	UCSF Computer Graphics Lab


> On May 7, 2017, at 12:46 PM, Oliver Clarke <olibclarke at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi, 
> 
> Is there any possibility of adding simple scripting features to the ChimeraX command syntax in the future? Obviously more complex things will be done in a python script, but if/then/for/while statements would be very handy to add to the power of one liners and aliases on the command line - e.g. for each chain in molecule1, if chain is protein, fit to map, things like that?
> 
> Cheers
> Oli
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