Basics

Understand the basics of the language before dealing with functions and advanced data structures.

Although SPLASH is similar to C/C++ and Java, it has its own subtleties you should be aware of.

• Constants and Simple Expressions
  Both string constants and numeric expressions are primitives in SPLASH.
• Null Values
  Each datatype contains a distinguished empty value, written null for its correspondence with null values in relational databases. The null value encodes a missing value. It cannot be compared to any value, including itself. Thus, the expressions (null = null) and (null != null) are both 0 (false).
• Variables and Assignment
  As with other programming languages, using variables within SPLASH involves declaring the variables and assigning them values.
• Datatypes
  SPLASH uses the standard CCL datatypes integer, string, float, long, money, money(n), date, timestamp, bigdatetime, interval, binary, and boolean.
• Datatype Abbreviations
  Use datatype abbreviations to provide alternate names to datatypes. Abbreviations are most useful when working with long datatype names.
• Blocks
  Segment code into blocks to declare variables and set their values local to the block.
• Control Structures
  The control structures of SPLASH are similar to those in C and Java.