I think it's unlikely anything about this behavior will change no matter what bug report is filed. There's the backward compatibility issue you raised (although I personally think that is usually a cop out) but you could also argue that what happens is by design.
I'm thinking your hope for a "more right" answer is probably in vain at this point! Pete On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 10:53 AM, Alex Tweedly <a...@tweedly.net> wrote: > On 20/03/2012 17:17, Pete wrote: > >> So I wouldn't vote for a bug report that asked for lines to behave like >> characters in this respect. I would vote for a bug report that asked for >> this situation to be caught as an error (although I think it would have to >> be a run time error not compile time since the start and end points could >> be variables or expressions). >> >> Lost in this discussion is the reason why someone wanted to do this in the >> first place. Alex, I think it was you that started this whole thread - >> did >> you have a specific reason for wanting to specify a line range with an end >> point before the start or was it just an observation? >> >> No, no specific reason to want to do it - it kind of happened by > accident :-) > And it wasn't so much an observation as a question - > can someone give me a rationale for this behaviour so I can deal with it > better ? > > What I *wanted* to do was replace line 'x' of someContainer (and > everything after it) by my new data, > so I did the (temptingly logical - but WRONG) thing of > > put newData into line x to -1 of someContainer > > NB that is simply wrong, because "line -1" means the last line that is > there - not to the end after what I specified :-) > > as it happened, the container had x-1 lines in it at the time (including a > trailing line delimiter, just to confuse things), so that became equivalent > to "put newData into line x to x-1 of someContainer" > > I knew that what was happening seemed wrong - but couldn't figure out how > or why. Jacque's explanation showed me what I should do - but still left > that niggling feeling of something being a bit odd. > > I can get what I wanted in a couple of safe ways > a. delete line x to -1 of t !! inverted range - but AFAIK it does > the right thing with it in all cases > put newData into line 2 of t > > b. put newData into line 2 to kInfinity of t -- where kInfinity is > some arbitrarily large constant > > I'm not sure what I would vote for now, hence I haven't yet put in a bug > report. Personally, I'd probably like a run-time error, but I suspect that > the need for backwards compatability would prevent that being feasible. > > -- Alex, still hoping for someone to come up with a "more right" answer :-) > > > > ______________________________**_________________ > use-livecode mailing list > use-livecode@lists.runrev.com > Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your > subscription preferences: > http://lists.runrev.com/**mailman/listinfo/use-livecode<http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode> > > -- Pete Molly's Revenge <http://www.mollysrevenge.com> _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list use-livecode@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode