The purpose of this document is to provide a short introduction to PLAN and the basic usage of the implementation. It will be of help to people just starting with PLAN, although experienced PLAN programmers might use this as a quick reference.
PLAN is implemented in Java, API 1.1, and is composed of a number of packages with names in the form PLAN.*. Basic knowledge needed to execute java classfiles is assumed; please refer to the appropriate Java documentation for more. This document also assumes that installation (of both PLAN and its required components) has completed successfully; refer to the Installation document for that.
In the code examples below, it is assumed that the code is being executed from the PLAN directory, created by the distribution. If you would like to execute the code from some other directory, simply prepend the class names given to the java command with PLAN. For example, rather than typing
java ARMain -?you would type
java PLAN.ARMain -?
This should be useful if you have PLAN installed on a machine shared by a number of users, and you would like to run PLAN programs from your home directory. Note that your CLASSPATH must be set up to include the parent directory of the distribution PLAN directory, or the code will not work (since the java interpreter will not be able to find the appropriate PLAN packages). So, if PLAN is installed in usr/local/PLAN, you would update your CLASSPATH to include usr/local.