At 5:27 PM -0600 on 6/23/99, Scott Raney wrote:
>Nor to me, although the above description seems wrong to me because
>it allows:
>put item 3 delimited by ":" to item 2 delimited by "/" of whatever
Aha! You found the can of worms :) But is there a reason that should not be
allowed? Things like this become possible:
put item 1 delimited by "<a>" to item 1 delimited by "</a>" of HTML \
into first_link
This can be really useful when there is a seperate "open" and "close"
delimiter. It avoids ugly offset code:
get item 1 delimited by "<a>" of HTML
put char 1 to offset("</a>",it)-1 of it into first_link
And, IMHO, the former is _much_ cleaner and easier to understand than the
latter.
And, to me at least, it does not seem an implementation nightmare:
Internally, convert to chararacter references. Also, there are some
interesting optimization opertunities -- certainly should be much faster
than the get followed by offset!
I honestly don't see why we should not allow:
put item 1 delimited by comma to line 15 of container1 into container2
Is there really any reason to force the user to jump through hurdles to
achieve the same effect? Why may we not intermix multiple types? It does
open some possibilities:
put item 5 to (through?) end of line of container1 into container2
put char 3 to end of word of container1 into container2
I think I'll stop before I stop opening cans of worms and start opening
vats of worms.
