haha ok thanks paul. well ive changed 'n' to 'distance' now and as you will be able to tell there is a snippet of code which reassembles ASCII input from Processing into numbers which the library 'accelstepper' can understand. so n (or 'distance') is the number I typed in from my processing sketch.
instead of messing around with control structures, I would like to try the SRAM approach. I would really appreciate some pointers as to how I might achieve this.
best, arthur