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From: jeffv@bisco.kodak.com (Jeff Van Epps)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.rexx
Subject: Iterating on Stems
Message-ID: <1991Mar9.215906.4976@ssd.kodak.com>
Date: 9 Mar 91 21:59:06 GMT
Sender: news@ssd.kodak.com
Reply-To: jeffv@bisco.kodak.com (Jeff Van Epps)
Followup-To: comp.lang.rexx
Organization: Eastman Kodak
Lines: 23

Hi gang.  I just got ARexx, and I've translated some Perl scripts to Arexx.
The Perl scripts used associative arrays, for which the ARexx equivalent
seems to be "stems" or "compound symbols".  Putting data in worked fine,
but getting them out was more complicated than necessary.

PERL:    while (($key,$value) = each(assocary)) { /* stuff */ }

ARexx:   ???

The question is, once you've stored the data, how do you get the system
to iterate over the "array", telling you the keys?

I solved it by storing the keys at the same time as the data, in a more
normal array (keys.1  keys.2  keys.3  etc.), with a count of how many keys
have been processed so far.  But this strikes me as a kludgy workaround for
a missing language feature.  Does the language feature exist and I just
missed it??

-- 
If the From: line says nobody@kodak.com, don't believe it.

    Jeff Van Epps          jeffv@bisco.kodak.com
                           rochester!kodak!bisco!jeffv