method for improving performance in an automatic test system

摘要

Disclosed is a system (100) which compiles instrument commands (202) from a test instrument programming language, along with data in the commands, into a machine usable form (302). The machine usable instructions (302) thus sent to the instrument are significantly smaller than the original human readable ASCII characters of the source language, and the machine usable form (302) of the commands avoids additional parsing in the instrument. During the compilation process (216), all parameter data being sent to an instrument is placed into a single data structure, which reduces the number of parameters passed between the test software and any device drivers used to access the instrument. IMAGE