SP Limitation of Constants for Subscripts

Is there a workaround for the idiotic syntactic prohibition against variables for subscripts in stored procedures? I need to parse a string that I get back from a cursor, but am stymied because of this limitation. My braindead approach would read the column into a character-type variable, then loop through the string, evaluating each index as required. Alas. Does Informix eat its own dog food? Any alternate solutions would be greatly appreciated.