Chapter 4.8:  Conference List Information

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There is a family of functions that provide basic information about conferences.  All of these functions begin with "$cl_", to indicate that they refer to information about a list of conferences ("cl", as in conference list).

$cl_list(names)

Evaluates to a list of conference numbers.  If names is empty (i.e., nothing), $cl_list() evaluates to the list of all conferences on the host that are accessible to the current user.  If names contains one or more words, $cl_list() evaluates to the list of conferences that match any of the words in names (that are accessible to the current user).  Example:

for cnum in $cl_list(web x)

$cl_list() becomes the list of all conferences whose names start with "web" or with "x".  (The "for" loop thus sets cnum to each such conference number in turn.)

The list of conference numbers is sorted, not by number, but by the name of each conference, regardless of the order of the arguments to $cl_list().  Sorting is independent of upper/lower case, i.e. they are sorted as if all the conference names were in lower case.

$cl_num(name)

Evaluates to the number of the conference whose name matches name.  If there is an exact match, returns that number.  If there are "substring" matches (e.g. $cl_num(abc) matches "abcdef"), one of the matches is arbitrarily selected.  The current user must have access to the conference in order to "see" it.

$cl_name(num)

Evaluates to the name of conference number num.  Note that the name may be in mixed case!