Many Cards Versus One Card and a List Field

[Peter Alcibiades]

I have to admit to not having been able to make Rev work as a storage and 
retrieval language and am getting close to giving up after a couple of weeks 
hard trying.  Its mostly the documentation probably.  It must be possible 
since people on the list are doing it, but there seems no way to find out how 
from the documentation. 

The problem is not storage.  Nor is it retrieval.  It is reporting.

Its a childishly simple problem.  There is a file with 15k records.  Tab 
delimited.  Each record has five fields and is of the form:

number  eg 123
description  eg Pen, Pencil
price eg 2.00
category eg AA, AB...
date eg  12/4/2008, 21/5/2008 (UK style)

We then have 30 fields, which are the combination of a category and a month.  
So for instance we need to look at each record, if and only if it has both AA 
in item 4 and /4/ in item 5,  then add the price item 3 to field AAApril.  If 
and only if it has both AA and /5/ then add it to AAMay, and so on.  6 
months, five categories = 30 fields..  

Its a five minute job in a spreadsheet, but its defeated me for a couple of 
weeks now in Rev.  

There must be a way of combining switch, break and if-then to do this.    The 
different ways I've tried sometimes go into loops.  Sometimes they 
accumulate, as if case is leading it to retain previous totals and add new 
match totals to them.  Sometimes they put all zeros into the fields.  
Sometimes half the fields go blank when I know there are matches.  Sometimes 
it records half of the AAs, or a quarter.   Sometimes it works with some of 
the months, or some of the categories. 

What is also deeply discouraging is that even can one get through this, there 
will be the problem of how to make Rev print it in Linux.  This seems 
insuperable.  It doesn't see the installed printers.  Like it doesn't see the 
installed fonts.  No idea why, everything else does.  Maybe going out to the 
shell and using a2p will work?  Maybe a different distro than debian?   But 
this could well be another black hole....

Peter