Your points are good but FWIW ; is a command separator and at a "higher level" than quoted string parsing. Find "foo;bar" is for better or worse exactly the same as Find "foobar" CharlesSent from a mobile; please excuse the brevity. -------- Original message --------From: Paul Gilmartin <[email protected]> Date: 3/15/18 9:45 AM (GMT-08:00) To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Two string instruction questions On 2018-03-15, at 08:27:57, Charles Mills wrote:. > > 2. TRT is a single op code but that does not make it "fast." > The peculiar evil of TRT is that "Everything looks like a nail." You need only hammer on it enough with TRT.
In ISPF, the command: FIND "foo;bar" ... fails for "Unterminated delimited string". But: SAY "foo;bar"; /* in Rexx */ echo "foo;bar"; # in POSIX shell printf( "foo;bar\n" ); /* in C */ In the all 4 languages ";" is a command separator. Only ISPF fails to understand that in a quoted string it should not have that special meaning. I suspect that ISPF does a misguided bottom-up search for ";" with TRT and deems it an unconditional command separator. (Yes, I know that I can choose to sacrifice some other character as a command separator, and avoid that in strings. At times I've used "¾". But why should such mickeymouse be necessary?) (Yes, I know that I can specify my search target in hex. Ugh! It would be better if I could use sporadic hex escapes in otherwise plain text.) -- gil
