Download pdf guide - VSN International

3.8 Unnamed data structures 33Lower and upper-case labels are distinguished, unless you set option CASE=ignored inthe POINTER statement. You can also set option ABBREVIATE=yes, to allow the labelsto be abbreviated. (By default, CASE=significant and ABBREVIATE=no.) So, if youhad specifiedPOINTER [NVALUES=labs; CASE=ignored; ABBREVIATE=yes]\employeeyou would be able to refer to employee['name'], for example, as employee['n']or employee['Name'].3.8 Unnamed data structuresIt can be wasteful and tedious to set up a structure explicitly when it is needed only oncein a program. So GenStat allows you to define an unnamed structure instead. Someparticularly useful types of unnamed structures are described below.The unnamed scalar is just a number. Whenever GenStat expects the identifier of ascalar, a number may be given instead. In fact, you have been using this type of unnamedstructure already: the statementVARIATE [NVALUES=10] xis equivalent toSCALAR [VALUE=10] nVARIATE [NVALUES=n] xHowever, the converse, that you can use a scalar instead of a number, is not always true.The exception is with pre-multipliers and post-multipliers when, as mentioned in Section3.7, the scalar must be preceded by the substitution symbol (#).The other forms all have a common style: they start with an exclamation mark, then atype code, and then a list enclosed in round brackets. An unnamed variate takes the form!V( list of numbers )where the letter V can be in either upper or lower case, or equivalently!( list of numbers )For exampleGRAPH rain; !(1...8)plots rain against day number, 1 to 8.The unnamed text takes one of two forms. If the text has a single value, then the valuecan be placed within quotes (') and used instead of the identifier of the text. Forexample:GRAPH [TITLE='Rainfall during my holiday'] rain; !(1...8)If there are several values, the form is!T( list of strings )where the letter T can be in either upper or lower case. For example:PRINT !t(Sat,Sun,Mon,Tues,Wed,Thur,Fri,Sat),rainThe unnamed pointer has the form!P( list of identifiers )where, again, the letter P can be in either upper or lower case.There are also unnamed expressions (type code E), and unnamed formulae (type codeF). Finally, type code S provides another way to specify an unnamed scalar.Unnamed structures are particularly useful when assigning values to several structures.The directives that are used to declare data structures all have a parameter as well as anoption to specify the values of the structures that are defined. (This is one of the few