20.3 Interpreting Commands from a File

For all practical purposes, any interpreter is pretty useless if it only works interactively. I have added a ‘source’ built-in command to ‘sic_builtin.c’ which takes lines of input from a file and evaluates them using ‘sic_repl.c’ in much the same way as lines typed at the prompt are evaluated otherwise. Here is the built-in handler:

And the source function from ‘sic_repl.c’:

The reason for separating the source function in this way, is that it makes it easy for the startup sequence in main to evaluate a startup file. In traditional Unix fashion, the startup file is named ‘.sicrc’, and is evaluated if it is present in the user’s home directory:

This document was generated by Ben Elliston on July 10, 2015 using texi2html 1.82.