On Aug 15, 2012, at 8:24 AM, Richard Gaskin wrote: > Peter M. Brigham wrote: > > If I put the following into a field: > > How many "words are in this field?" > > and then try > > put the number of words of fld "f" > > I get > > 3 > > That is not what *I* would expect. There was a discussion last year > > on this list of the pros and cons of maintaining the HC convention of > > regarding anything in quotes as a single word. I still don't think it > > makes sense. In my universe the answer is 7. > > But your universe wasn't designed by Apple, and Apple's universe has a dent > in it. ;) > > There are more than a few oddities the HyperTalk designers implemented, and > when the MetaCard engine was born in '92 it made good sense to support them. > 20 years later the relevance of HT compatibility may be dismissible, but now > that we have 20 years of MetaTalk/Transcript/RevTalk/LiveCode lying around, > it wouldn't be realistic to expect that to change. > > For myself, when I need an actual word count and run up against quotes, I > just do this before getting the number of words: > > replace quote with space in tMyText > > If LiveCode is lucky enough to be around in another 20 years we can expect > that many more users to have shaken their heads in disbelief that this is > necessary. > > But most if not all languages have some gotchas which are accidents of its > history, and LiveCode is no exception. > > So as with any other language: we try something, it doesn't work as expected, > we learn how to deal with it, add a line of code, and move on. > > Maybe somewhere down the road we can see LiveCode2, an optional which could > be activated with a flip of a global property to make for a more sensible set > of syntax for the sanity of newcomers. > > In the meantime we are where we are, and warts and all it's not a bad place > to be.
Oh, I agree with that wholeheartedly. In the scheme of things it's a minor complaint. My griping does not negate the fact that I love so much about LC overall. And it's possible to work around a lot of these gotchas given the versatility of the language. That's why God made utility libraries! -- Peter Peter M. Brigham pmb...@gmail.com http://home.comcast.net/~pmbrig _______________________________________________ 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
