Arguments

Medical Logic Modules (MLMs) can access their arguments via the special ARGUMENT identifier:

(id, name, birthdate) := ARGUMENT;

Passing arguments

To pass arguments from the command line, use the -a when running MLMs, followed by one or multiple arguments, separated by spaces. An argument must be a valid Arden Syntax constant, such as "Jane Doe", 1 YEAR or 1970-01-01 or a list of constants, such as ("x",TRUE,"y"). Note that string constants must be in between double quotes, otherwise an error will occur. Special characters like quotes, parenthesis and spaces inside constants must be properly escaped, depending on your command line interpreter:

• The Windows Command Prompt can escape spaces inside a constant by wrapping it in double quotes. Quotes in a string constant need to be escaped with backslashes:

  arden2bytecode -a (3.5,2) "5 WEEKS" 123 "\"Jane Doe\"" -r arguments.mlm

• Bash needs to escape quotes, parenthesis and spaces. This can be done with backslashes or by wrapping the constant in single quotes:

  ./arden2bytecode -a '(3.5,2)' '5 WEEKS' 123 '"Jane Doe"' -r arguments.mlm

Concerning how to use the -a flag, you may also look at the command line options wiki page.

Lists and multiple arguments

Lists are handled different than multiple arguments, but likely to be mixed up:

For the following statement

(value1, value2, value3) := ARGUMENT;

and the following arguments

arden2bytecode -a (1,2,3) -r arguments.mlm

value1 will contain the whole list and the other values will be NULL.

The correct command line options would be:

arden2bytecode -a 1 2 3 -r arguments.mlm