Publishing Your Tasks

You've just finished creating some nice little tasks that do some cool stuff, and you feel that your new tasks might be useful to other SiMPLE programmers besides yourself. How can you make your tasks available to the world?

Publishing your SiMPLE tasks amounts to little more than making your source listings publicly available. But there are a few things you should keep in mind when doing so:

• Documentation - Even though you  are probably quite familiar with how to use your tasks, your users won't  be. (And they probably wouldn't be too thrilled if they had to wade through your source listings in order to figure out how to use them.) So it's important that your source listings contain some documentation (i.e., at least a few comments) that provide general instructions for your users. Furthermore, this documentation should be conveniently placed at the very beginning of each source module, rather than having them scattered throughout the listings. (But, if you choose to do so, you might include some additional comments throughout your listings for the benefit of those users who might want to try modifying your code . . . at their own risk, of course.) Click here to see an example of the kind of format that we recommend for source modules.*

  *If your task listing was generated by the SiMPAINT program, you can
  get by with fewer lines of documentation because all such tasks have the
  same standard set of calling parameters. (Click here to see an example.)

• Names - It is important to remember that your  task(s) may not be the only  ones that users will be appending to their programs. Therefore you must be careful of how you choose the names of any "public" items that are used in your listings. (Public items include all containers that have been placed in "Common" as well as the very names of the tasks and functions themselves.) For example, users would not want their libraries to contain modules for two different tasks both of which are named "setup". To help minimize the possibility of such naming conflicts, we suggest that you either prefix or postfix all of your public names with your own lower-case initials separated by an underscore character (for example, "jfk_setup" or "setup_jfk").
  
  
• Independence - Ideally, every module that you create should be as independent of other modules as possible. But if your module does  need to invoke tasks or functions that are contained in other modules, don't forget to include in your module the corresponding "Append" compiler directives for those other modules. In addition, any information that needs to be communicated to/from tasks or functions in those other modules should be passed by using calling parameters, and not  by using "Common" statements. Otherwise, users who want to pre-compile your modules in command-line mode won't be able to use them. (This is because the scope of a "Common" statement in a compiled module does not extend outside the module). Therefore, if two or more of your tasks/functions need to access the same "Common" container, you should place all of those tasks/functions in the same module.

Where Can I Publish My Task Listings?

Where you choose to publish your task listings is pretty much up to you. If you have your own website or blog, you might want to publish them there. Or you might consider sending your task listings to us. If we think that they might be useful or interesting to other SiMPLE users, we'll add them to our Online Module Library.