Failing to understand the oddities of the "line" chunk

[Peter M. Brigham, MD]

On Mar 20, 2012, at 1:52 AM, Geoff Canyon wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 12:54 PM, J. Landman Gay
> <jacque at hyperactivesw.com>wrote:
> 
>> I think it should behave the same way character selections do. A negative
>> range has been a valid construct since HyperCard and is, actually, the only
>> way to set the insertion point by script. It's a necessary feature.
> 
> 
> This seems to work, and is far clearer:
> 
>   *select* before char 8 of fld 1
> 
> "after" works as well, as do word and line references.

Right, but if you have an insertion point in a field (no text selected), then "the selectedChunk" will contain something like
   char 13 to 12 of field 2
This is designed so that the selectedChunk is always in the form
   char <startchar> to <endchar> of fld <fldNbr>
That's just the way it works. After dealing with chunks for a while it does make sense, and it's consistent.

Jacque's point still holds, though -- the implementation of this form using lines instead of chars is *not* consistent.

try this:

put "one,two,three" into t
replace comma with cr in t
put t into tt
put "WHAT!!!???" into line 3 to 2 of tt
put t & cr & cr & tt

which gives you:

one
two
three

WHAT!!!???one
two
three

The "WHAT" should appear at the start of line 3, or possibly should replace the cr at the end of line 2, depending on how you look at it.

I agree with you that this syntax should be blocked by the IDE at compile time if it's not going to be implemented properly at runtime. I'd call it a bug.

-- Peter

Peter M. Brigham
pmbrig at gmail.com
http://home.comcast.net/~pmbrig