Handling of final delimter (was Re: "this me"?)

[Mark Wieder]

Kay-

Wednesday, August 14, 2013, 5:03:48 AM, you wrote:

> I very much like Mark Wieder's proposal. I also like how he's debunked
> speculation as to imminent failure if empty last items were actually
> counted as an item. On the other hand it's pretty easy to prove that LC's
> current bipolar treatment of items regularly trips up new users.

Thaks, Kay. But Jacque is correct in that the current implementation
is robust. And has been for a quarter of a century. It is also
internally consistent within the definition that a delimiter separates
items *unless the last item is empty*. And there's a body of code that
does rely on the way things work now. We can't change that.

Jacque and I more often than not have different ways of coding any
given problem (this is a good thing), and I call on her expertise when
I've got my developer blinders on because I know she'll come up with
something that will cause me to re-evaluate my assumptions. What I've
settled on here is a simple alternative that provides a more logical
(IMO) way of describing items in a string and doesn't change the body
of legacy code.

I think it's important to think about implementing this now that we're
at a critical point in LiveCode's development, as the language is
about to be exposed to a much larger community who don't have years of
experience dealing with the stumbling blocks that we've all come to
work around. The fewer glitches we have in the language ("this me?")
the easier it will be to get a wider acceptance of xtalk and thus
everybody wins.

-- 
-Mark Wieder
 mwieder at ahsoftware.net