Re: Re: Re: Re: xTalk: Delimiters

[Anonymous]

Kevin wrote:

>MetaCard allows negative chunk expressions for this.  Expressions that
>start with a - read from the end of the container.
>
>put char 3 to -1 of line 7

I've seen this kind of thing before, in the Mac database program Panorama.
It's useful, and in Panorama's rather ugly syntax it seems positively
elegant.  But for an xTalk, it seems rather unnatural to me.  I mean, all
of us know that -1 is less than three, don't we?

Panorama had (has?) some other neat string-manipulation tricks.  I don't
remember the exact syntax, but you could replace the character indices with
characters, which would just find the first occurrence.  So,

characters i through -y of "twas brillig and the slythy toves"

would be

"illig and the slythy"

but I'm not suggesting this syntax for xTalk.

Thanks for the info.

--Carl