The DEFPROC Command

If you have many procedures of this type you may not wish to include them in full in your login file, because this will require them all to be compiled when ICL starts up and may therefore slow down the start up process. The DEFPROC command allows you to define commands which run ICL procedures, but with the procedures only being compiled when they are required. For example if the EDIT procedure described above was put in the source file EDIT.ICL we could put the following DEFPROC command in the login file.

    DEFPROC ED(IT) EDIT.ICL

This command specifies that the command EDIT (with minimum abbreviation ED) is to run the procedure EDIT in source file EDIT.ICL.

The procedure will not be loaded and compiled until the first time the EDIT command is issued.