Help on using rodCreatePath

The return value of the for loop is t. Thus, it is as if you are passing the following to subRect:

?subRect list( t)

You will need to build your list of subRectangles prior to calling the rodCreatePath routine:

subRectList = nil
for(i 0 cnt_num-1
  subRectList = cons(list(?layer ...?space...) subRectList)
)

?subRect subRectList

Derek

Thanks Derek.

 I added subRectList to my procedure, but there are some errors and a warning.

*WARNING* Cancelling function, exceeds nestability limit of 5. (It is werid that when I re-run the procedure without editting my program, this warning disappeared. What does this warning mean?)

*Error* fprintf/sprintf : format spec. incompatible with data ((?layer "Contact" ?width 0.36 ?length...) (?layer "Contact" ?width 0.36 ?length...)

Does this error indicate that I misused the  fprintf/sprintf  functions? Indeed, I printed some results to test the program, but I've already comment them out with semicolon after this print error, however, this action did not solve the problem.

*Error* load, error while loading file -"*loadstring"

"loadstring"? what doed this variable mean?

Many thanks in advance.

Lei

Since you didn't send any code, I can only comment on what the error messages mean.

The warning about the nestability limit of 5 is related to doing interactive functions in your layout window. For example, if you begin creating a rectangle in Virtuoso and have started the command but not finished it, you are in the middle of an "enterFunction". If, before you finish the rectangle, you start a ruler, then you have just "nested" two enter functions. Cadence has a setting where you can change the number of levels of nestability to be greater than five, but this is probably not what you need (it is on the CIW->Options->User Preferences form). What I suspect is happening is that you are creating an enterFunction to call your code for drawing your path with your variable number of sub rectangles. My guess is that your "enterPath" (or some enterFunction) is in the middle of a loop and thus causing your nesting problem. Move it out of the loop to solve the problem.

I can't explain why you have an fprintf/sprintf error when you claim that line is commented out. However, if you are using one of the printf commands and you want to print out a list, you need to use the format spec %L rather than %s. This will allow you to print out a list. If it is for debugging purposes, you can always just use println(myvar).

I don't know why you are getting the loadstring error either. It is likely that there is a syntax error in the skill code that you are loading that is causing this. What you should do is turn on some debugging features that will allow you to get more details about your errors. You can enable a deeper stack trace that shows you where your failure was and you can also see the values of variables when the failure happens.

sstatus(stacktraceDump  t)
sstatus(stacktrace  10)

I hope this helps.

Derek

I found where I was wrong.

I built the subRectList the way you told me, but when it is referenced in the ?subRect argument, I wrote the code as below:

?subRect list(subRectList)

not ?subRect subRectList

I checked the ROD user guide, and found out that in this ?subRect argument, the format of list-of-lists is required, which is already realized within subRectList.

 Thus when I used list(subRectList), the form looked like list-of-list-of-lists. But I am confused this format caused fprintf/sprintf problem, or maybe it was just imcompatible the required format of "list-of-list".

By the way, the debugging commands are really helpful.

Thank you very much!