John,
thanks for finding out && explaining.
I'll go with your explanation, even though
you indicate original reasoning is no
longer available.
I'll stop complaining ;-)
Cheers - have a happu new year!
Abe Kornelis.
=========
Abe Kornelis lamented:
I daresay - even if it has always been that way,
it still feels counter-intuitive to me.
Of course, that is not really an argument.
And really, the difference in handling either
quotes or ampersands makes it only worse.
I think it's been that way since about 1968 or so. I checked my old
Assembler (F) manual and it states that ampersands are not paired when
assigning character constants in SETC expressions.
I agree that it's counter-intuitive, and suspect it was necessary to avoid
accidental identification of variable symbols in complex or nested
substitutions.
