On the other hand, there are abbreviations of the commands to let the amount of things to type in not become too overwhelming. So you can use C for CHANGE, CO for COPY, DE for DELETE etc. Besides, you may leave out any space that is not necessary for syntactic reasons.
Between the admitted minimal abbreviation and the full command word any transgressive grades are allowed, so that you may start working with the complete commands as a beginner and then work through to the minimal abbreviations a professional may use. Example: change chang chan cha ch c - all these spellings are allowed for the CHANGE command.
Commands may have operands (parameters), which are normally separated from the command word and from each other by spaces. As mentioned above, you can leave out the separating spaces if the resulting creation is not ambiguous.
For example, the command COPY copies the specified lines (starting with the first specified one to the second specified one, includingly) behind the current line. The COPY command will be discussed in detail at another place in the text, the example here is only supposed to demonstrate the varying possibilities for spelling.
copy 100 200The minimal abbreviation of COPY is CO, the space before the specification 100 is not necessary and therefore the shortest spelling is:
co100 200As a third operand the name of a workfile can be specified, from which the lines will be copied. For such a name (e.g. abc) has to begin with a letter, it is possible to write it directly behind the operand 200 without a space:
co100 200abcIf the area you want to copy includes the first or the last line of the workfile, you do not have to specify the numbers of those lines. In this case, it will be enough to denote them with their symbolic values f (for first line) and l (for last line), respectively. So, in this example, you have to write at least:
co f l abchere, all spaces are necessary.
It is also possible to enter several commands at once as you will see in the next section.