List Words from Textarea

[Richard Gaskin]

Joe Lewis Wilkins wrote:

 > Jacqi, forgive me for questioning/doubting you, but I really have
 > trouble believing that, what with the literally thousands of scripts
 > I wrote in HC over a period of nearly 20 years. I just don't remember
 > having to strip commas from words when parsing and sorting text. If
 > you say so, but why would Jim have had to point that out if it is the
 > "normal" way of doing things? I guess the mind IS the "first" thing
 > to go. (smile)

One of the difficulties with using HyperCard as a basis for any 
comparison is that Apple killed it so long ago that it's tied in our 
memory to the feelings of youth:  we forget so much and remember only 
the good times. :)

IIRC, Scott Raney sighed with deep resignation more than a few times at 
having to implement word delineation using HC rules.

Punctuation isn't so bad; it's easy to strip those out as stop 
characters.  More challenging, at least conceptually in some cases, is 
working with quoted strings, which are treated as a single word no 
matter how many words are between the quotes.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
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