Appendix A: Programming Tips
This appendix gives you some helpful tips for programming with ACL/E. You can use this information to solve problems that you may encounter in your ACL/E programs, or to make your ACL/E programs more efficient.
This section contains the following topics:
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Define and Delete Variables
This section discusses some common situations with user-defined variables and also shows you another way to define variables in an ACL/E program.
ACL/E User-defined Variables
A thorough understanding of how ACL/E user-defined variables work will help you to use them more efficiently.
1. If you use a UDEFINE statement to define a variable and then use a VDEFINE statement to define a variable with the same name, a SET statement will update only the variable defined with the VDEFINE statement. Therefore, if the variable is used in another ACL/E program, the value will not be passed to the called program.
2. If you use a GDEFINE statement to define a variable and then use a UDEFINE statement to define a variable with the same name, a SET statement will update only the variable defined with the UDEFINE statement. The new value will not be passed to the CA TPX global symbol table.
3. If you use a VDEFINE statement to define a variable and call another ACL/E program that uses a VDEFINE statement to define the same variable, the two variables will be treated as separate variables.
If you want to pass the value of a variable to a called program, use a UDEFINE or
GDEFINE statement to define the variable.
Appendix A: Programming Tips 99
