Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!cmcl2!nrl-cmf!ames!pasteur!agate!violet.berkeley.edu!steve
From: steve@violet.berkeley.edu (Steve Goldfield)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Arrays in dBASE
Message-ID: <6760@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 28 Jan 88 21:29:16 GMT
Sender: usenet@agate.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: steve@violet.berkeley.edu (Steve Goldfield)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
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Someone commented recently on the absence of arrays in dBASE.
When I first bought it in 1983, I considered that a big drawback,
especially since I was limited to only 64 variables in II. I
managed to make pseudo arrays by using string addition to add the
indices to the array name using macros. More recently, however, I
realized there was a neater solution. An array is a sort of
table, so it can be stored in a database with a single (or for
that matter multidimensional arrays can be handled, too) field.
In a program I wrote recently in McMax (the Macintosh version of
dBASE III), I needed an array and put it in such a database which
I delete and pack as soon as I'm done with it. Clearly, it is
quicker to use an array stored in memory than a database stored
on disk, but in dBASE it is much easier in terms of programming
to use the database approach.

Steve Goldfield