Mike Walter wrote:
>    '| REXXVARS' ,
>    '| DROP 1' ,              /* Drop source var */
>    '| JOIN 1 / /' ,
>    '| SORT W2' ,             /* Sort by VAR names */

"Schuh, Richard" wrote:
> 
> I think that you will find that no REXX variable name can contain
> slashes, so that is axiomatic, not a conjecture.

You're forgetting stemmed variables.  Their tails can contain any
characters at all.  In the case at hand, I do also know they don't
contain any blanks, because the original author carefully specified every
single symbol in the tails as a literal starting with 0, even the ones
containing numeric indices.

But Rob's got the right answer:  AUTOFIELD, which looks at the first
character of the record for the field separator.  I see way back in
PIPELINE NEWS1110 that "This character (and a matching one at the end of
the record if there is one) is ignored in the field counting."  Is the
parenthesis the broken part?  I notice that the last field is counted
differently than with FIELD (consistently in all the levels I have
available, from 22020000 to 110B0016):

  pipe literal *1*2*3*|specs autofield -2;-1|cons
  2*3*

  pipe literal *1*2*3*|specs fs * field -2;-1|cons
  3*

¬R

Reply via email to