>For those of you who want to read this quickly, a syntax summary. All will
>be explained below. All single-quoted things are literals, and spaces can
>be any amount of whitespace. An elipsis (three periods -- ...) indicates
>continuations in the same fashion for however long the user feels like,
>brackets indicate optional portions. A vertical bar, |, indicates different
>options (of which one must be chosen). Unquoted words are expressions to be
>filled in by the user. Assume the entire thing is on one line; it sort of
>wrapped.
Anthony,
please use official syntax conventions used in all Hypercard docs:
Unquoted words are keywords/identifiers which have to be written just like
that, optional stuff is enclosed in [ and ], expressions to be filled in by
the user (variables, containers, etc.) are encliosed in < and >. Literals
are, of course, quoted. So, your example would read, ideally:
put item <integer> [delim[ited] [by] <character|regexp>] of <container>
into <container>
where a chunk can also be a container.
>Perhaps also allow 'of' to be replaced by '=' or 'is':
>
> 3) put item 3 (delim="3") of list into i -- or "delimiter="
> 4) put item 3 (delim is "3") of list into i -- or "delimiter is"
Horrible! This will collide with expressions and looks like someone wanted
to set the delimiter to a boolean expression. Also, in xTalk there is no
such thing as using "=" or "is" to assign a value to a variable, one uses
put. The only place where it's different is the "repeat for" construct,
which I consider a weak spot in the language.
> put item 1 (delimted by "a" or "b" or "c" or...) of ...
> put tiem 1 (delim "a" or "b" or "c" or...) of...
> put item 1 (delim="a" or "b" or "c" or...) of...
> put item 1 (delim is "a" or "b" or "c" or...) of...
Same here. This looks like someone using the "or" operator to assign a
boolean expression as the delimiter. With a command like "answer" this is
tolerable, as there it occurs only in a very limited scope, but with nested
chunks and all that, code becomes unreadable if one intermingles boolean
expressions and chunks. Please, don't do it.
>The important question would be should we allow:
>
> put item 1 (delimited by "ab") of...
>
>In other words, should we allow multicharacter delimiters? I see no reason
>why not!
Same here. We should optimize for single-character delimiters, but
allowing muli-character delimiters sounds like a valuable option.
>And how long until we add in regexp support? It'd fit the syntax:
>
> put item 1 (delimited by regexp "[a-zA-M]") of...
> -- or "regular expression" or whatever
I think regexps this way are terrible, because they're unreadable.
HyperCard has such cool readable syntax, and we should first try to come up
with readable syntax for a regexp feature (although MC has already got its
own regexp function). Ideally this would be some syntax as readable as
HyperCard's sort command has:
sort the lines of cd fld 5 by item 1 of each
Cheers,
-- M. Uli Kusterer
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