SIMSCRIPT II.5 Programming Language

Programming Language Concepts
Print statements appear in heading and report sections, and usually are controlled by for or
while statements in the part of the report section labeled "program statements." The flow of control
in a report section like the one which appears on this page is as follows:
1. Execute statements between begin report and begin heading, if any
2. Execute statements in the heading section, if any
3. Execute statements between end ''HEADING and end ''REPORT if any, executing statements
in the heading section every time a page is changed.
These statements are adequate for many reports. A report for which they are not suited is one that
must print more than 80 columns of information per line. Adding the word double to a print
statement in the following way:
print I double lines with expression list as follows
specifies that 2i, rather than i, format lines follow that are to be read in pairs and interpreted as one
format line 160 columns long. To fill an entire line on a printer 132 columns wide, write a statement
such as:
print 1 double line as follows
AAAAAAAAAAAAA...................................AAAAAA
AAAAAAAAA................AAAAAAAAA
The first format record has an A typed in each of its 80 columns. The second format record has an
A typed in its first 52 columns. "Double width" print statements are not restricted to report sections.
Any print statement can be expanded to double width. If the last column statement is
used, the first format record is scanned up to the specified column, instead of column 80.
The inclusion of an optional clause in the begin report and print statements adds one more
important report-generation feature. Figure 3-1 shows the kind of report the clauses handle—reports
that have rows of data with more items in each row than a single page can contain.
In preparing this type of report, a series of pages is printed with different column indices. In Figure
3-1, pages 1 and 2 are printed with column indices ranging from 1 to 50, and pages 3 and 4 are printed
with column indices ranging from 51 to 100. This feature, specifying an iteration sequence for
column indices and having pages printed on a wide page, is known as column repetition, and is
specified by an optional clause in the begin report statement:
begin report printing for, in groups of e per page
The word for represents a for, while, or until statement, perhaps qualified, that generates
column indices. The arithmetic expression e specifies the number of indices in this iteration sequence
to be used on each page. Thus, the statement:
begin report printing
for I = 1 to 50, in groups of 10 per page
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