Right you are, Glenn. I'd forgot that SPEC calls something to scan a delimited string that quietly gobbles up STRING to mean that it is a delimited string and not test for hex or binary.
I'll revert SPEC, now that I am temporarily a bit wiser. Right now SPEC STRING STRING S 1 is broken. Oh well. j. 2009/1/8 Glenn Knickerbocker <[email protected]>: > On Thu, 8 Jan 2009 11:20:10 +0100, John wrote: >>pipe literal | spec string 1-1 1 | cons >>- > > This works as far back as z/VM 4.4.0 (and did any of us ever notice?). > That's why I'm confused about what you're "introducing" now. > >>Yes, |specs #1:=1 print #1| is what I have in mind. If you're telling >>me it is a bad idea, I shall desist. > > I haven't come up with a case yet that's actually a valid spec today, but > I think someone who accidentally left out an output column like that > would be pretty astonished to have his pipeline run without errors and > then find the string "1:=1 print " pasted over the front of all his > records. (If you ever added the convenience of filling in a default > output column for any spec whose last item was a field, rather than just > a single item, then this case would become ambiguous.) > > ¬R "People late for work only deal with the essentials, cutting away > uneccesary tasks like Occam's Razor with no time to shave." --oTTo--Bahn >
