A slot is a place or opening in something, especially a door or window. It can also refer to a time slot in a calendar, appointment, or other schedule. The term is most often used in the United States. Similar words include slit, aperture, and channel. A computer has slots for expansion cards and hard drives. People use them to store data and programs.
Periodic slots are tables that represent data that repeats at a regular interval. For example, a set of evaporation coefficients for a reservoir would be entered into a periodic slot to represent the rate of change in the evaporation at each month’s end. These data are not the same each year and therefore cannot be entered into a standard series slot, which loses the time element in the data.
In RPL, these slots are referenced using the syntax: Slot[DateTime][E]. Like other tables, these slots can be configured to interpolate or look up when accessed between rows. The configuration is determined by examining the settings for the slot in the View menu. The default is to interpolate.
Table slots may be configured to have Column Labels and Units displayed on the screen and/or in the selection information area. In addition, they can be configured to have repeated values compressed by the user (optionally). The status of each selected cell is shown in the Selection Info Area or can be displayed in a popup display using the Show Selection Statistics command.