Introduction to the PDP Simulation Environment - Computational Explorations in Cognitive Neuroscience - page 420

and you should be able to locate the next item ( Edit )
in that menu, and so on.

Edit dialogs also can have menus on the top of the
window. These menus contain less frequently executed
functions that apply to the object in question. The Show
menu controls how much detail is shown in the dialog
— if you suspect something should be there but it is not,
try Show/Detail .
Finally, the main guts of the edit dialog are the val-
ues, which are arranged vertically with name — value
fields on each line. The name field identifies the nature
of the value, while the value field provides the neces-
sary interface for editing the field. Note that you can
click on the name field to view a more detailed (but still
somewhat brief) description of the value.

A.5 Edit Dialogs

Every object in PDP++ can be edited , which means that
a window containing all of the modifiable values and
functions associated with that object can be called up,
manipulated, changes made to the underlying object (or
not), and then closed. Most menus in the system contain
an Edit menu item, which lists the objects available
for editing as submenus of that item. After selecting one
of these objects, the edit dialog window will appear.
Every edit dialog has the following four buttons on the
bottom, which control the editing process:

A.6 Control Panels

Ok This applies any changes made to the object in the
edit dialog, and closes the edit dialog window. Note
that this button is not available on the overall exercise
control panels, because they should never be closed
(except of course when the project itself is closed,
which happens automatically).
Apply This applies any changes made to the object in
the edit dialog, and keeps the window around for sub-
sequent use. Always press Apply after changing
something in the edit dialog! .
Revert This effectively undoes any changes made by
the user in the edit dialog, and reverts the object to
its unedited state. It is also possible that something
else other than the edit dialog could have changed
the value(s) of the object (e.g., if the network is be-
ing changed, an edit dialog displaying a Unit or a
Connection will have different values after process-
ing than those shown in the edit dialog). If this has
happened, then the revert button will also update the
display to show those changes.
Cancel Aborts any changes made in the edit dialog,
and closes the window. Again, this button does not
appear on the overall control panels.

A control panel is an edit dialog associated with a Script
object that contains parameters and functions (buttons,
menus) that are specifically relevant to a particular exer-
cise. These windows can be identified in several ways.
They typically have a title that appears in the top bor-
der surrounding the window that ends with _ctrl (and
typically starts with something like the name of the
project that was loaded). These windows typically float
to the top after a project is loaded, and they are po-
sitioned under the mouse pointer. These edit dialogs
are also identifiable because they do not have Ok or
Cancel buttons.
All control panels have a View button on the left,
which opens other windows to view. Selecting the
NOTHING option under View will close all windows
(except the Root and the control panel itself) — this is
useful for cleaning things up if you get lost in a sea of
windows. Also, View will always raise the window
in question to the top if it is already open somewhere.
Control panels almost always have a Defaults but-
ton, which restores the original default parameters.
This is useful to restore standard settings after playing
around with various parameters.
It is a good idea to move the control panel to a loca-
tion where it will not get covered up by other windows,
because it is your lifeline for controlling the simulation!

In addition to these standard buttons, different edit
dialogs and control panels can have other buttons that
appear just above the standard ones. These have de-
scriptive names, and are described in more detail in the
explorations.