So, it might surprise you to learn that every script is actually a single function along with its arguments. And it might seem at first like this requirement would limit how much a script can do. But remember that a function can have arguments and that some of those arguments can be functions as well. For example, you might want to add the square root of to the sine of The Add function is the single function, but its arguments are also functions. But that's a really limited script! So what is the single function that makes up every JMP script? Well, it's called the Glue function, and it enables you to combine multiple other functions into that single function. So for a simple example, maybe you want to assign the value to a variable named x and then you want JMP to find the Sine of that variable. You use the Glue function to combine two or more functions into one function. The first argument for the Glue function would be the Assign function, which takes two arguments -- the variable name and the value -- and assigns the value to the variable x. Then, the second argument to the Glue function would be the Sine function with one argument: x. The Glue function evaluates each of its arguments in turn and returns the result from the last argument. Now, if you've done any scripting or looked at scripts from your colleagues or scripts written by JMP, you've probably never seen a script that begins with the word Glue. That's because, like many other functions, Glue has an equivalent operator, which is the semicolon. In a lot of programming languages, a semicolon indicates the end of a statement. But in JSL, the semi-colon is the glue operator -- it tells the parser that there are more arguments coming. So x equal semicolon Sine(x) is equivalent to the Glue function with the Assign and Sine functions as its arguments. So this is how you combine multiple functions into the single function that is your script. And there are a lot of functions built into JMP -- one way to learn about them is through the Scripting Index, which you can find in the Help menu.
