Broken and Useless SCL Features

This section is here to document those features of SCL which are broken or just useless within OpenSTA. SCL is a relatively old language, it is much older than OpenSTA itself and with this it has inherited some baggage. Although OpenSTAs SCL is considerably different than the earlier SCLs (in implementation and features) it still shares a reasonable amount with its ancestors; some of these things don't make a whole lot of sense in OpenSTA or were just never finished properly.

Within the ENVIRONMENT section there are a couple of little gotchas that technically work but don't seem to make any sense. The DESCRIPTION is mandatory, that is, if you delete it then your Script will not compile. You can provide an empty description string but you can't delete the command, this doesn't make much sense. The MODE HTTP could probably also be defaulted as OpenSTA scripts are always used for HTTP.

The command and control characters played much more of a part in the previous generations of SCL. It was possible to change what these characters were and all commands were actually introduced by the command character. This fact means that the documentation and use of these characters is perhaps a little weird.

The ability to pass data back from called sub-scripts is not present. Any variables used as parameters are not updated on return and the variable provided in the RETURNING clause seems to be cleared rather than updated.

Totally Broken Features:

• Conditional Compilation
• File Handling