The Help File

The HELP files are simple text files with two levels of help. The list of help topics in the library should be identical to the list of commands of the program. In addition, a specific topic named LANGUAGE should include a one line description of all commands, with a subtopic named NEWS which describe the latest news on the specific language.

The HELP files format is the following

      1 TOPIC
          help for this topic
      2 SUBTOPIC
          help for a subtopic of the previous topic
      1 OTHER_TOPIC
          text for other_topic
      1 ENDOFHELP

where 1 and 2 are in the first column of the text file, and followed by a single space. This format is easy to modify as it is a simple text file, but much slower to access because it is sequential. The 1 ENDOFHELP (with no trailing characters) sequence indicates the end of the help file.

The help file name should be assigned to the logical name specified in the SIC_BEGIN call, or given explicitly.