General Remarks to the Format Description

The general structure of a RadioTracer output file is:

ASCII-header + the rest

where the header defines whether the rest will be in ASCII or in binary.

Throughout this section, the following meta symbols are used for the formal description of the formats (modified Backus-Naur-Notation):

//	comments follow
( )	group of symbols
{ }	optional group of symbols
|	exclusive OR
&	any order allowed within group
[ ]	non-terminal symbol
< >	terminal symbol (token), where
	<lower case> means required
	<UPPER CASE> means optional
	<{> <}> means optional
	(but must be used in pairs correctly!)
	case insensitive within file
" "	input defined terminal symbol
	(but must be double quoted in file too!)
	case sensitive within file
$ $	number representation
$type == x$	means value must be equal to x
:n	width in bits for number representation in binary files

The accepted delimiters to separate tokens in ASCII files are:

blank	ASCII character code 32	(0x20 hexadecimal)
tabulator	ASCII character code 9	(0x09 hexadecimal)
carriage return	ASCII character code 13	(0x0D hexadecimal)
line feed	ASCII character code 11	(0x0A hexadecimal)

Please note the following remarks:

• Except for user defined tokens (such tokens are double quoted), the reading of the tokens in an ASCII file is case insensitive.
• A user defined token cannot contain a double quote (").
• The maximal length of a token including user defined ones is 128 characters.
• The maximal length of a line in an ASCII file is 512 characters including the carriage return and/or line feed.
• Comments in RadioTracer files are line oriented.
• Comments are only allowed in ASCII files, they start with the comment symbol, and they continue for the rest of the line.
• The default comment symbol is *.
• The comment symbol can be changed at the very beginning of the file, i.e., before the usual header, with comment <symbol>. For instance, if a RadioTracer file begins with comment #, comments start with the symbol #.
• Sequences of bits in binary files are always padded to multiples of 32 bits.

The following short-cut notation is used for iteration:

[list] = [item] | [list]