Weirdness with Evaluator variable names

Help & Support
1

Tinkering with an evaluator column I tried using "age1" and "age2" as variables, which failed for some reason. With some more experimenting I found the following behavior:

xyz = 10;
Output(xyz);
// works as expected

xyz1 = 20;
Output(xyz1);
// works as expected

Age = 30;
Output(Age);
// works despite "Age" being the name of a function

nnn = Age("2024-05-15", "s");
Output(nnn);
// still works although "Age" has been used as a variable before

AgeX = 40;
Output(AgeX);
// works as expected

// but...
Age1 = 50;
// Syntax Error (5)

I tried the same with other function names: Everything is fine until I append a digit to their name, while adding a letter is fine.

Obviously easy to work around but not very obvious. Perhaps worth a mention in the manual?

(BTW: Maybe a new tag "evaluator" would be useful for the Help & Support forum?)

2

Thanks!

We decided there was no real need to prevent function names being used as variables since the parser can tell the intent from the context, and some names (e.g. "age") are ones you might actually want as a variable.

The bug with appended digits not working is fixed for the next beta.

4 Likes
3

Great, it's fixed in 13.6.2.
Thanks!