delete chunk.

[DunbarX at aol.com]

This seems perfectly intuitive to me.

When you delete an item, you are doing something entirely different than 
just manipulating the contents of an item. In one case you reduce the number 
of items. In the other you merely insert, or remove, data from them.For 
example, "a,b,,," has five items. Putting empty, or anything, into item 4, say, 
makes sense, and we have not changed the number of itms at all. 

I think it all may just be a misperception, having to do with the last item 
being perceived differently from an interior item. I'll bet this thread 
would not have started if the process had been:

delete item 3 of "a,b,,," 
put empty into item 3 of "a,b,,," 

Craig Newman