text into a tabstopped field

[Richard Gaskin]

Robert Sneidar wrote:

> Ah hah!! Just as I expected! There IS ambiguity in Transcript... err  
> Revolution!!! ;-)
> 
> Seriously though, this should be corrected. I am reminded that in  
> Foxpro a plus "+" can add two numbers AND concatenate 2 strings. How  
> is this the same you ask? Because in both cases the same thing turns  
> out to mean different things based upon context, which means I cannot  
> make a code converter that works 100%. No computer language should  
> even mean 2 different things using one convention. (Anyone at Runrev  
> listening?)

There's a striking relevance between the first and last sentence here -- 
if intended, quite clever. :)

The solution is the same for both:  before attempting to convert tokens, 
the context of each instance must be taken into account.

With "+", this means both operands need to be checked to see if they 
evaluate to numbers (the "is a number" operator is good for that). 
Determining the extents of the expressions which comprise each operand 
may be difficult or easy, depending on the flexibility of FoxPro (it's 
been many years since I've programmed in it so I no longer recall).

With "Transcript", it means every sentence containing it must be read 
and evaluated by a human to ensure that translating the token won't 
introduce ambiguity.  The popular solution seems simpler:  most folks in 
the Rev community just continue to use "Transcript" for clarity. :)

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Managing Editor, revJournal
  _______________________________________________________
  Rev tips, tutorials and more: http://www.revJournal.com