On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 9:07 AM, jesse <je...@fsck.com> wrote: > > 'left' and 'right' are probably not the right names for functions which > trim leading and/or trailing space, since their meanings get somewhat > ambiguous if a language renders right-to-left instead of left-to-right > or vice-versa >
I'm in favor of using the proposed syntax, but I will agree with lwall that it seems like overkill to have the specialized trims. .trim should be non-destructive and .=trim should be destructive (these seems intuitive). Some languages run in the direction of left-to-right, some in the direction right-to-left (some even top-to-bottom). No matter what language you speak or which direction your native language reads, left is the same for everyone as well as right. If we wanted to simplify matters, use :left, :right and :both. Those have the same meaning everywhere. If we wanted language dependent version, use :leading, :trailing, and :both. That will require each implementation properly handle the language variations. By the way, good work on this. Everyone loves useful string functions. -Jason "s1n" Switzer