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 pre-declared 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!