⁹It is worth noting the legitimacy of referencing virtual contacts to output bits (e.g. contact Y5), and not just to input bits. A “virtual contact” inside a PLC program is nothing more than an instruction to the PLC’s processor to read the status of a bit in memory. It matters not whether that bit is associated with a physical input channel, a physical output channel, or some abstract bit in the PLC’s memory. It would, however, be wrong to associate a virtual coil with an input bit, as coil instructions write bit values to memory, and input bits are supposed to be controlled solely by the energization states of their physical input channels.