Applescript equivalent of PHP $$ variable

Question

Hi, i hope someone can help with this.
I'm new to mac developing and am trying to write a simple mac app to output some serial commands. This is all working fine but the software i'm using to output the serial commands works on applescript, hence using it over a purely Cocoa application.
Anyway, i have a series of buttons called statusButton1 to statusButton 12 say, and i want to turn them green (from grey) when they are clicked. I can do that by the command
statusButton1's setImage_(greenLightImage)
Where greenLightImage is the variable of the green button image.
What I am trying to avoid is a pile of if statements to turn the correct button green and the others off depending on which button is pressed. I am currently calling a function passing the number of the button pressed.
What i would like to do is something like...
statusButton(passedVariable) setImage_(greenLightImage)
I've done a lot of PHP programming before and in that language i would do something like
$temp = "statusButton" . $passedVariable
$$temp... (whatever command to change image)
I have tried many things and can't find an equivalent. Is there such a thing, or is there a better way (sure there is)
Thanks

Answer 1

AppleScript doesn't have a lot of language features such as pointers or variable variables, but when you have several items that you deal with often, usually you can put them into a list (or record) and then index into or loop through the items, for example:
# a property or top level variable containing all of the buttons
set buttonList to {statusButton1, statusButton2, statusButton3, statusButton4}
on doButton:sender # handle button press
  repeat with aButton in buttonList
    (aButton's setImage:greyImage) # unset
  end repeat
  sender's setImage:greenLightImage # reset
  # whatever
end doButton:
Edit to add:
Cocoa also has several classes that provide methods for managing arrays (lists) and dictionaries (records), as well as some controller classes for various object collections.