4.1.1 Arrays

An array is a variable type that collects and stores several values under a single name and allows access through an index number.

Arrays are defined as var or global, like any other variable. Array definitions and access formats are as follows.

Definition	var array name = [ Value, Value, …]
Access	Array name [Index]

The values that make up an array are called “elements.” Distances, an array shown in the following example, has a total of five elements. The index starts from 0. Element 0 and e lement 1 of “distances” are 10 and 10.5, respectively.

The [ ] operator is used as follows to read or write the value of an array’s specific element value. The following shows an example of an object that is defined and accessed.

0001.job	var distances = [ 10, 10.5, 12.7, 11.92, 9.5 ] distances[1]=20.5 print distances[0], distances[1] end
Result	10 20.5

The number of elements in an array can be acquired by using the len() function. Previously, the len() function was introduced as a function to acquire the length of a string. If an array is put as a parameter of len( ), it will return the number of elements in the array.

Function name	Description	Example of usage	Result
len(a)	Returns the length of the string if a is a string. Returns the number of elements in the array if a is an array	len("HELLO") len([20, 30, 80])	5 3

The for-next statement is mainly used to perform some processing on all elements of an array.

0001.job	var i var distances = [ 10, 10.5, 12.7, 11.92, 9.5] for i=0 to len(distances)-1 distances[i] = distances[i]+10 print distances[i] next end
Result	20 20.5 22.7 21.92 19.5

It does not matter if the values stored in the array are of different types.

0001.job	var i var arr = [ 10, "abc", true] for i=0 to 2 print arr[i] next end
Result	10 abc true