This User Guide can help you to overcome most problems in your programming, and the ready-made HELP programs will demonstrate all of the techniques described in its pages. But a User Glide can never get inside your own programs and explain what is going on. Believe it or not, AMOS Professional can!
The AMOS Professional Monitor is a very simple idea, but it is also incredibly powerful. It may summoned up to examine any AMOS Professional routine, or even a single expression. The Monitor is used to find out exactly what is happening and why, and to make an instant report on screen.
Calling the Monitor
To call up the AMOS Professional Monitor from the Editor, simply click on the [Monitor] option
in the Project Menu, or press the [F5] key.
MONITOR
instruction: call AMOS Professional Monitor
Monitor
MONITOR is also a command in its own right, and can be typed from Direct Mode or included anywhere in your program listing. When called from inside an AMOS Professional program, the MONITOR command stops the program and summons up the Monitor Screen. The monitoring process will then start from the location immediately after the MONITOR command, ready to step through the program one instruction at a time. For example:
E> Print "Time to call the Monitor!" Wait 100 Monitor Print "This is the next instruction"
Before the next instruction is executed, the Monitor Screen appears, and the system is ready to be exploited.
Using the Monitor
The AMOS Professional Monitor is totally icon-driven and controlled by the mouse, so there is
no need to type anything at all! To prepare for a step-by-step guide of the Monitor, you are
recommended to load one of the demos on the AMOSPro Examples disc, so that the Monitor
can analyse it.
If the Monitor screen is displayed, click on the quit icon [Q] in the top right-hand corner of the push-button control keypad of the Monitor Screen, and load the following example now:
LD> Load "AMOSPro_Examples:Examples/H-0/Help7.AMOS"
Run the example from the Editor, to remind yourself how it looks, then break into it with [Ctrl]+[C] and press [Spacebar] to return to the Editor.