Other than the looping operators, such as <LOOP> , <SQL> , or <fetch> , there is no way to access the individual members of a variable. This is consistent with Vortex' overall philosophy of making common tasks easier; other languages bog down with multi-statement for loops, counter variables, and end-of-loop checks to manage arrays.

The <LOOP> statement, which we used in the previous example, is worth a closer look:

  <SCRIPT LANGUAGE=vortex>

  <A NAME=main>
    <$things= apple hair   lemon  leaf  ocean grape  soil  night>
    <$colors= red   orange yellow green blue  purple brown black>
  
    <LOOP SKIP=2 MAX=4 $colors $things>
       Color #$loop is $things $colors <BR>  
    </LOOP> 
    The next color is #$next
  </A>

  </SCRIPT>

In this example we have two parallel lists, $things and $colors . We iterate over just 4 members of the list (MAX=4 ) - after skipping the first 2 (SKIP=2 ).

If we run this script, we see the results: