PS TEXT FORMAT Reference Manual

Introduction to TFORM
11387 Tandem Computers Incorporated 3–93
Tips
Recall that characters enclosed within quotation marks represent a
string to TFORM. Thus, TFORM can convert any system variable
occurring within quotation marks to a string entity. When you use the
BEGIN LIST STYLE command and the two variables SYS_LNUM and
SYS_LDESC together, you are combining a numeric entity and a string
entity. If both variables occur in the command line and SYS_LNUM is
not contained as part of a string expression, you must convert
SYS_LNUM to a string entity so TFORM can process them together.
There are two ways to convert SYS_LNUM to a string. One way is to
use the STRING function to evaluate the SYS_LNUM variable. TFORM
returns a single value for the SYS_LNUM variable in the form of a
string. The STRING function is discussed in Section 5.
The second way to convert SYS_LNUM to a string entity is with an
indirection escape sequence, which works similarly to the STRING
function; it evaluates an expression and indirectly represents that
expression as a string value. Indirection is discussed in more detail in
Section 4.
Remember that you can use SYS_LNUM by itself as a general
expression with no conversion; for example, BEGIN LIST STYLE
10*SYS_LNUM defines a list with the labels 10, 20, 30, and so on.