A conscientious effort was made in creating examples to present not only instructive examples, but also any related error messages that appear if you try the examples. However, due to environment and DCL shell differences, you may occasionally obtain different results. Any differences should be relatively minor, but it is advisable to try the exercises in a database environment that will not affect any valued information.

Some examples that syntactically must occur on the same line may appear on multiple lines for typesetting purposes. In the case of non-M examples, a backslash ( appears at the end of the continued line. In M examples, an effort was made to construct examples where command lines did not wrap, in many cases using the argumentless DO. In cases of M command syntax description, and system message displayed in examples, you should always assume a single line is correct and that the break is entirely due to typesetting constraints. No separate convention is used in these cases to avoid confusion in trying the examples or syntaxes.

The examples make frequent use of literals in an attempt to focus attention on particular points. In normal usage arguments are far more frequently variables.