The commands in this category are used to store temporary information into variables, translate strings and evaluate mathematical expressions. Whilst these thus provide functions familiar from other programming languages, it should be stressed that they should be used sparingly. The navigation and stream functions in MERL provide powerful and concise ways to generate the necessary output in almost all cases. You should first become expert in using those fundamentals of MERL before starting to use the commands in this section. Otherwise, you run the risk of doing something similar to programming with an ANSI C style in an object-oriented programming language.