On Wed, 18 Mar 2009 09:48:10 -0500, Ian S. Worthington <ianworthing...@usa.net> wrote:
>>> It implements them as a conceptual subset of stems, and >>> they are indexed with strings rather than by integers which >>>actually makes them rather more powerful once one breaks >>>out of the array mindset. >> I'm not sure what you mean by the "array mindset"? >I refer to the tendency of programmers new to rexx stems, but >familiar with hll arrays, to reduce their (non-numerical) problem >to one of integral indices into arrays rather than make full use >of the rexx stem facility. >... I'm not new to REXX stems nor recently familiar with HLL arrays, but *still* make REXX blunders based on array-think. It's seductive. An individual compound variable can be assigned a value, and the stem can be assigned a value. That's all there is with REXX stems. You cannot assign a value to a "row" or a "column" (or any other more abstract partitioning of the compound variable space) no matter how much you might want to. I conceptually had a very non-array-like structure BASE.i BASE.key.n Where i and n were integers and key was alphanumeric. I wanted all BASE.key.n to be set to the value of key for a fixed set of keys. But what I wanted doesn't count for much. FOO."BAR". = "BAR" is invalid. :-( I think my attempted logic came more from wishful thinking than from any knowledge of HLL array processing. Even if more powerful that arrays, there are limits to compund varaible processing in REXX. Pat O'Keefe ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
