FIS made a conscientious effort to present intuitive examples and related error messages that appear if a user tries those examples. However, due to environment and shell differences, you may occasionally obtain different results (although the differences should be relatively minor). Therefore, FIS suggests that you try the examples in a database environment that does not contain any valued information.

Examples follow the descriptions of commands. For readability purposes, long shell command lines are broken up in the manual into multiple lines, where each line except the last ends with a back-slash character "\". Users must always assume a single line is correct and that the "\" break is entirely to make sure that the examples are easy to read for first-time users. Any backslash other than at the very end of a line in the manual is part of the text of the example. To facilitate copy/paste of examples when learning GT.M, clicking on single line examples displayed on multiple lines for readability opens a window or tab where that example is available with unbroken command lines.

In M examples, an effort was made to construct examples where command lines did not wrap, in many cases using the argumentless DO.

The examples make frequent use of literals in an attempt to focus attention on particular points. In normal usage arguments are far more frequently variables.