On Tue, 21 Dec 2010 08:24:16 -0500, Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.) wrote:
>In <listserv%[email protected]>, on 12/20/2010
> at 11:20 AM, Paul Gilmartin said:
>
>>Whose moronic design fails to treat a command delimiter surrounded by
>>quotes as plain text?
>
>Someone who understands the law of unintended consequences.
>
>>That's what quotes are supposed to be for.
>
>No. What would you expect ISPF to do with an input of
>
> C /'/"/;C /C"/C'/
>
May I paraphrase my careless failure to use proper PDF
terminolgy?:
Whose moronic design fails to treat a command delimiter appearing
in a delimited string as plain text?
Your example contains no delimited string, according to ISPF's
rules, inadequately described in the tutorial and inferred
empirically. So, assuming semicolon is your command separator,
this is two commands, each of which should fail with:
Required string missing
The CHANGE command requires a second string of source data.
However, I would expect that:
c 'wombat' 'foo;bar'
would change every occurrence of the 6-character delimited
string on the left to the 7-character delimited string,
including the semicolon, on the right.
The tutorial says:
A delimited string begins and ends with apostrophes
('single quotes') or quotes ("double quotes").
I take this to mean that all characters after the initial
apostrophe until the final apostrophe are the content of
the delimited string, and not to be taken as token
separators, command separators, or any other kind of
separators or metacharacters.
I was introduced to ISPF when I was coding in a language
in which semicolons were important syntactic elements;
semicolon as command separator was unacceptable. I could
not deem any other character dispensable, so I edited my
profile in hex to use a nondisplayable character as my
command separator. I would have used FIELD MARK, but
that didn't work even when I entered it in hex.
-- gil
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