Help topic for using assertions(?) to replace simple loops?

For constantly increasing (or decreasing) values, the p function would be a better choice, i.e. 

DisplayHelpTopic "Waveform Arithmetic and Assignment"

However, depending on what you want to do you may want to look at wave scaling in case you just need "x-values": 

DisplayHelpTopic "SetScale"

Otherwise you were probably looking for:

DisplayHelpTopic "? :"

w[1,*] means from point 1 to the end (*).

w[3,10] would mean from point 3 to point 10, etc...

w[0,*] would be the same as writing just w[], which means all points.

I probably should have mentioned that I tried p indexing using

but that doesn't evaluate over the whole range of wave w for some reason.  If numpnts(w) = 3 then the above statements in the function evaluate to

w = [2,1,1] and w = [1,2,1], respectively  (assuming w[0] = 1 statement from above). 

I now see that the correct answer seems to be

for some reason it's not intuitive to me to think about p simply being the index number automatically.  Thanks for the help!

olelytken wrote:

w[0]=1
w[1,*]=w[p-1]+1

w[1,*] means from point 1 to the end (*).

w[3,10] would mean from point 3 to point 10, etc...

w[0,*] would be the same as writing just w[], which means all points.

That's better than my w = p+1 answer, thanks!

Your original loop will fail at i = 0 and is also very inefficient. For instructional purposes, here is a better way to write the loop:

But even then it is much more efficient to write this as a wave assignment statement so that the looping is done internally in Igor and not in Igor procedure code. That would also allow you to add the MultiThread keyword to the wave assignment statement if you wished to. The equivalent wave assignment statement is simply

olelytken's response of

will give you the same end result, but it is less efficient because of the wave value lookup on the RHS of the assignment (the w[p-1] part).