Wow. Talk about not seeing the forest through the trees. There's never any good reason to create variables at runtime like that, regardless if there are ways to do it in the scripting language (which there invariably are). Your "on test" handler above uses a whole slew of lists to set up and create a bunch of "dynamic" variables when you should be stopping at lists and property lists (arrays and associative arrays) to do what you want, which is to store your data. The method you currently have conjured up is excessive at best, and bad programming practice at worst (See this link for some good discussion on why it should be avoided: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/103083/how-can-variable s-be-created-at-runtime)

So, I would do what you want like this:

-- initialize the property list (associative array, in other scripting languages)

gUserStatus = [:]

-- add an entry

gUserStatus["Bob"] = [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]

-- print the property array to the message window

put gUserStatus

-- ["Bob": [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]]

add a few more users:

gUserStatus["Mary"] = [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]

gUserStatus["Sue"] = [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]

gUserStatus["Paul"] = [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]

-- get value from property list, based off name

put gUserStatus["Bob"]

-- [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]

-- set value in value list, based off name, then put to message window

gUserStatus["Bob"][3] = 1

put gUserStatus["Bob"]

-- [0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]

so, I can add as many users as I want... as long as they're identified with unique properties (or keys, in other languages). I can even get the count or number of users:

put gUserStatus.count

-- 4

I can easily iterate through them and get/set information:

cnt = gUserStatus.count

repeat with i = 1 to cnt

  put "Name: " & gUserStatus.getPropAt(i) & ", Status: " & gUserStatus[i]

end repeat

In your example you don't know how many users you have because your variables are being dynamically created at runtime. You could create yet another variable to keep track of that, but why when you have lists and property lists that are perfect structures for this type of associative data?

There's a huge gap in your understanding how to structure, keep track of, and manipulate data, and it's important to fill it now by learning about lists and property lists (arrays and associative arrays). Doing it now will truly open up a whole new way of programming to you.