Record Variable Storage

Record variables are stored simply as strings. Each field is stored as a "fieldname=value" pair, delimited with semi-colons.

For example,

name="Joe Smith";age="34";experience="guru"

 

If you wanted to construct a whole record variable string from scratch, you would have to surround it in dou­ble quotes and escape each embedded quote mark with the backslash character, like this:  (C programmers should be used to this.)

rec = "name=\"Joe Smith\";age=\"34\";experience=\"guru\""

 

However, it is just easier to assign a field at a time to it. For example:

Rec = nil  // initializes as an empty string

Rec.name = "Joe Smith"

Rec.age = "34"

Rec.experience = "guru"

The fields in the record do not have to be in any particular order. There is no predeclared structure associated with record variables, so you are free to attach new fields whenever you want by simply assigning a value to them.

For example:

Location = GetSymbolLocation(symname)

Location.myOwnField = xyz  // append a field when you feel like it!