| Informix Guide to SQL: Reference Introduction |
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This section describes the conventions that this manual uses. These conventions make it easier to gather information from this and other volumes in the documentation set.
The following conventions are discussed:
This manual uses the following conventions to introduce new terms, illustrate screen displays, describe command syntax, and so forth.
Tip: When you are instructed to "enter" characters or to "execute" a command, immediately press RETURN after the entry. When you are instructed to "type" the text or to "press" other keys, no RETURN is required.
Icon Conventions
Throughout the documentation, you will find text that is identified by several different types of icons. This section describes these icons.
Comment icons identify three types of information, as the following table describes. This information always appears in italics.
Feature, product, and platform icons identify paragraphs that contain feature-specific, product-specific, or platform-specific information.
These icons can apply to an entire section or to one or more paragraphs within a section. If an icon appears next to a section heading, the information that applies to the indicated feature, product, or platform ends at the next heading at the same or higher level. A 
symbol indicates the end of feature-, product-, or platform-specific information that appears within one or more paragraphs within a section.
This section defines and illustrates the format of commands that are available in Informix products. These commands have their own conventions, which might include alternative forms of a command, required and optional parts of the command, and so forth.
Each diagram displays the sequences of required and optional elements that are valid in a command. A diagram begins at the upper-left corner with a command. It ends at the upper-right corner with a vertical line. Between these points, you can trace any path that does not stop or back up. Each path describes a valid form of the command. You must supply a value for words that are in italics.
You might encounter one or more of the following elements on a command-line path.
Figure 1 shows a command-line diagram that uses some of the elements that are listed in the previous table.
To construct a command correctly, start at the top left with the command. Follow the diagram to the right, including the elements that you want. The elements in the diagram are case sensitive.
Figure 1 illustrates the following steps:
Examples of SQL code occur throughout this manual. Except where noted, the code is not specific to any single Informix application development tool. If only SQL statements are listed in the example, they are not delimited by semicolons. For instance, you might see the code in the following example:
To use this SQL code for a specific product, you must apply the syntax rules for that product. For example, if you are using DB-Access, you must delimit multiple statements with semicolons. If you are using an SQL API, you must use EXEC SQL at the start of each statement and a semicolon (or other appropriate delimiter) at the end of the statement.
Tip: Ellipsis points in a code example indicate that more code would be added in a full application, but it is not necessary to show it to describe the concept being discussed.
For detailed directions on using SQL statements for a particular application development tool or SQL API, see the manual for your product.
) on a path indicates that you can only use that path the indicated number of times, even if it is part of a larger loop. You can specify size no more than three times within this statement segment.
