High energy physics collaborations rely on an assortment of computing tools. Many of these are ``standard'' packages written and maintained at international laboratories. There is a package used at Fermilab, Brookhaven and some other places called Analysis_Control [1] that helps to organize analysis into modules and provides a flexible structure for controlling the analysis. The most sophisticated example of its use might be the CDF production analysis, which was the first stage of data processing and produced multiple output streams for a diverse set of physics topics. It relies on the UIPACK package for the user interface and the YBOS package for memory management.
However, at MACRO we use CERN products[2]: FFREAD or KUIP for user interface and ZEBRA (or the simpler DST common block) for memory management. There is no analog to Analysis_Control in the CERN distribution. So I have written a simplified version of Analysis Control using CERN tools; it is called DASH (Data Analysis Shell). It is a friendly interactive environment, with online help, useful HBOOK utilities, KUIP-macros and command line editing. A typical use would be to run interactively on a few events, perhaps using a event dump module to debug your analysis, and then when you know what you are doing, to use the same executable in a batch job.
By the way: DASH is completely independent of MACRO analysis- it does not know anything about DST's, ERPs, tracks et cetera. However, DASH can control modules which may read a DST event, find a track, make a histogram. DASH is a user interface shell which surrounds the subroutines that do the real work. As an analogy to DREAM, each module is like a DUSER subroutine. The difference is that there can be several modules and you can run them in any order. It is not intended to replace DREAM (the physics analysis routines); it could theoretically replace the user interface (which is based on the outmoded CERN package FFREAD). This would require rearranging the DREAM analysis into modules; a fair bit of work, but potentially worthwhile.
DASH has already been put to extensive use during its testing phase [3]. It has been used for Muon Analysis DST data as well as MACRO ZEBRA data. There seems to be a growing interest in expanding its use. This manual will explain its features and show you how to use it.