Append Assignment (,=)

The ,= operator used after the LET keyword, assigns a variable by concatenating the current variable value with the formatted version of an expression.

Syntax

variable ,= expr

Important:

This operator cannot be used as an element of an expression, it is only allowed as assignment operator with the LET instruction.

Usage

The ,= assignment operator concatenates the value of the left-hand variable to a formatted form of the right-hand expression, and assigns the result to the variable.

The right-hand expression gets formatted with left space padding, according to the data type of the expression. For example, an INTEGER expression gets spaces on the left of the value, to always occupy 11 character positions. The USING operator can be specified to control value formatting.

The target variable should be a VARCHAR or STRING variable.

Note that CHAR(size) variables are blank-padded to size characters. As result, it's useless to apply the ,= assignment operator, as the value of the left-hand operand already fills the CHAR size completely.

TEXT variables cannot be used with the ,= formatting assignment operator.

Example

MAIN
  DEFINE x STRING
  LET x = "abc"
  LET x ,= 123
  DISPLAY x
END MAIN