At 2:20 PM -0600 10/21/02, Luke Palmer wrote:
I didn't call the problem unreasonable, I was objecting to its characterization as an "essential feature". It isn't. A useful thing, definitely, but there are a lot of those. It's hardly essential any more than, say, a hash that automagically maps to the current directory's files (iteratively, of course, catching all the subdirectories) is essential> Mailing-List: contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]; run by ezmlmX-Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Unverified) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2002 11:37:51 -0400 From: Dan Sugalski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> X-SMTPD: qpsmtpd/0.12-dev, http://develooper.com/code/qpsmtpd/At 11:09 PM -0600 10/20/02, Luke Palmer wrote: >What's the plan on having properties, or attributes (depending on how >far we're taking it), on individual characters in a string? I think >it's an essential feature, as Lisp has shown us. If there's an >argument otherwise, I'm all ears. While they're certainly useful, I think essential's an awfully strong word there. You'll note that, just off the top of my head, C, BASIC, Fortran, Perl, Python, Java, Ruby, Pascal, Oberon, Modula (2 and 3), Forth, Eiffel, Haskell, BLISS, C++, C#, COBOL, PL/I, APL, B, and BCPL> all don't do character properties/attributes. Fair enough. Then tell me how you solve this problem: You have a text file in a string, that the user has marked several places in. He's referring to words for which he wants to keep bookmarks in. Now, he deletes text (using substr), and we want to keep the marks relative to the words, not their positions. This seems easy, yet there's not necessarily an easy way to do it. Uh oh, violating perl philosophy :)
While perl is a language that makes it easy to do useful things, it doesn't mean that all useful things should be easy to do in perl. Given how large the set of Useful Things is, that's not unreasonable.
--
Dan
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