Hello everyone! This is my first post, and first time finding the board. I'm glad to have found you all. Hopefully I can find some answers here.

About me:
I'm a Chemical Engineering student. I'm fairly familiar with programming in MATLAB, and I've been programming on the Nspire CAS for about a month steady now. I'm not a complete beginner, but I'm far from a novice.

Anyway, as I said, I have many questions that I will be posting on my journey, and hopefully I can answer a few questions too. Please, if you have any Chemistry questions, or the like, feel free to ask away. As for programming....

About the program:
I am developing a very sophisticated program that will collect strings and values, ultimately plugging these values into tons of equations and displaying answers, activities, equations, and loads more of helpful calculations and features that will help other colleagues in my field.

One problem that I am having is, you'll see the variables here, ion - charge - sznm. These are values that are stored in a spread sheet, and the headings of the columns, are the same as the variable names (as I'm sure you're all aware... just trying to be as specific as possible):

mstm:={ion,charge,sznm}

This works perfectly. If I type mstm[3], on the calculator application, for example, and press enter, the 3rd row of the matrix is displayed. Likewise, if I type in the calc promt: mstm[1,1]    , it will display the value in row one, column one. Works perfect. Now, here's the question, how do I tell it to display "ALL" rows of column 3? In MATLAB you would say mtsm(:,3) , meaning all rows in the 3rd column...

Another question that I have: is there a way to do a search for a string and/or a value?

InString and Frequency, unless I'm doing it wrong, don't appear to be what I need in order to perform this task.

in MATLAB it's a simple "find" command, and in excel, I believe it's Vlookup or Hlookup, meaning vertical/horizontal lookup, if that helps anyone.



Another question: is anyone familiar with the "indirection operator"?

I'm curious if I were to have string values stored in a list, is there a way to write a while loop, for example, that would grab each string value and convert it to a variable?


I've searched for days for this answer, which led me here. Can you help? Please  Much appreciation.