TAL Programmer's Guide

Declaring Substructures
Using Structures
096254 Tandem Computers Incorporated 8–13
Declaring Multidimensional Arrays
You can nest substructures in a structure to simulate a multidimensional array.
The following structure simulates a two-dimensional array. The structure represents
two warehouses. The two substructures represent 50 items and ten employees in each
warehouse. The substructures are both nested at the second level but contain different
kinds of records:
LITERAL last = 49; !Declare number of last item
STRUCT .warehouse[0:1]; !Declare structure WAREHOUSE
BEGIN
STRUCT inventory[0:last]; !Declare substructure
BEGIN ! INVENTORY
INT item_number;
INT price;
INT on_hand;
END; !End INVENTORY
STRUCT employee[0:9]; !Declare substructure
BEGIN ! EMPLOYEE
STRING name[0:31];
STRING telephone[0:6];
END; !End EMPLOYEE
END; !End WAREHOUSE
The following structure simulates a five-dimensional array. The structure represents a
corporation that contains three branches. Each branch contains four divisions. Each
division contains up to six departments. Each department contains up to six groups.
Each group contains up to 20 employees.
STRUCT .corp; !Declare structure CORP
BEGIN
STRUCT branch[0:2]; !Declare substructure BRANCH
BEGIN
STRUCT div[0:3]; !Declare substructure DIV
BEGIN
STRUCT dept[0:5]; !Declare substructure DEPT
BEGIN
STRUCT group[0:5]; !Declare substructure GROUP
BEGIN
STRUCT employee[0:19]; !Declare substructure
BEGIN ! EMPLOYEE
STRING name[0:31];
STRING telephone[0:6];
END; !End EMPLOYEE
END; !End GROUP
END; !End DEPT
END; !End DIV
END; !End BRANCH
END; !End CORP