What does "PREP7" mean in PyMAPDL?

In pyansys examples I keep seeing the following line at the start of many examples:

mapdl.prep7()

After some searching I found some documentation in the APDL docs that explains "PREP = PREProcessor", But I can't find any documentation that explains what the "7" means. Can anyone help?

The best I've found is this third party blog that mentions there may have been other preprocessors once, but is this true?

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Pierre Thieffry

As far as I recall, /Prep7 as always been there (I starterd with version 4.4). There are other numbers like this: AUX12, POST1, POST26... I guess they all referred to different parts of the code that were originally numbered like this.

There are a couple 'processors' in APDL where you can do different tasks. /PREP7 is generally the first one where you start in to do your modelling. The second one is /SOL or solution, the third is /POST1 where you post process. If you had a bolt standard APDL analysis script you would build your model (/prep7), add loads/boundary conditions (/SOL) and then get results in /POST1. If you look hard enough in the documentation, there it tells you in which processor you can use the commands. Some were limited to certain processors. In all APDL commands documentation you should find a statement at the very end of the Notes section: The XXXX command is valid in YYYY processor(s)

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Pierre Thieffry