Since the very early days of NC and CNC in the years 1970 1980 s, many control systems manufacturers provided a number of special features to their products, some were standard, some were optional. Many features were developed as innovative improvements, others became new features and several others may also have been included for the reasons of keeping up with the competition . Regardless of the addition of various features throughout the years, one special feature stands out to this day and presents many constructive possibilities to a imaginative CNC programmer. This feature has been available to all controls virtually from the beginning it is called the block skip function. Another common name for the same function is block delete function. This latter definition presents a rather unfortunate choice of words for a function description that does not delete anything keep in mind that there are no program blocks to be actually deleted from the CNC program, although they may be skipped on demand, that is optionally yes, this is a big difference.

Functions that are simple to program are often pushed away, forgotten, or at least given low priority by programmers who have to rush a job to the production line. Block skip qualifies for this category, because it is generally quite simple to program. All that is needed in the CNC program is a slash symbol (yes, a symbol represented the forward / slash)!