Inconsistent Behavior of Lists
Richard Gaskin
ambassador at fourthworld.com
Wed Sep 15 20:54:45 EDT 2004
Dan Shafer wrote:
> A list should be seen as a comma-delimited data container where commas
> separate data elements. Spaces after commas should not be significant.
> They aren't in any other language I know of that processes list data
> structures. a="1",b="2" and a="1", b="2" should be identical. In Rev,
> they are not. Rev sees the first element of the second item as " b",
> which makes no syntactic sense as far as I can tell.
It's arguably more consistent than other implementations that play fast
and loose with their delimiters. In these other languages, an item
delimiter is either a comma or a combination of comma+space, or perhaps
even comma+space+space and comma+space+return (is it all white space or
just ASCII 32 that gets overlooked?).
Transcript is more consistent: an item delimiter is a single character,
and anything that falls between those delimiters is considered part of
the data. It works the same regardless of the delimiter, and does not
attempt to second-guess whether other characters are significant or not.
Transcript also provides the "word" chunk type, so you can also parse
item contents in a way that conveniently strips out space characters.
So at least with Transcript you can have it both ways. I'm not sure how
one would handle significant space characters in a language that decided
for you that they weren't significant.
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World Media Corporation
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