"Janis Papanagnou" <janis_papanagnou@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:kg7f2e$qjg$1@speranza.aioe.org... > Am 22.02.2013 09:49, schrieb Tony Proctor: > > Iterate, test, correlate; this is something I regularily do with awk. > You know that you have arrays to store the data in memory, associative > arrays usable for relations, and loops and conditions to operate on > that data. I am sure you can construct complex requirements that will > lead to more code than what is typical for awk. But I've also got the > impression that you might not be fully aware of awk's possibilities? > > For another (non-awk) approach organise your data in a database and > operate on it using SQL alone. > > Janis Thanks Janis but I'm not talking about record-by-record processing, and firing of actions based on conditions for each record [Yes, I have used AWK a lot]. I'm thinking of more complex genealogical entities that have to be compiled into 'objects' before they can be manipulated. SQL (even the versions with procedural extensions) is similarly too low-level Tony Proctor