Pairs (was It's a list!...) (was Function Newbie...)

[Dar Scott]

On Friday, December 6, 2002, at 10:08 PM, Dar Scott wrote:
> I'm working on a way to pack some values together and take them apart.

On Saturday, December 7, 2002, at 03:15 AM, Malte Brill wrote:
> Hi Dar, I defenitly want to learn more about recursion. Are there any
> tutorials on the web, that could help me getting  startet?

Here are my simple functions that inspired my alternative to lists, be 
they boxes, nodes or whatever.  They are much simpler than what I'm 
working on now and in many ways are better.

They simply form a pair from two values and extract the values.  This is 
the basis of lisp lists.  From this can be built all kinds of structures 
and functions to handle them.

Traditionally, functions built upon pairs are recursive.

The values for pairing can be any strings including binary strings.  No 
arrays.  Numbers may lose something.  Pairing can be nested, of course, 
and especially stringed together to make "lists".  Put empty into the 
right side of the last pair when making a "list".

Have fun!

*****************
-- Rev 1.1.1 OS X 10.15

-- Pairs
-- Dar Scott thunked this up 2002
--
-- Make a pair with P(a,b), extract with L(p)-->a, R(p)-->b

-- create a pair from two strings, the left and the right
function P A B
   local lenBytes
   put A & empty into A
   put binaryEncode("N",length(A)) into lenBytes
   return lenBytes & A & B
end P

-- get the left side of a pair
function L thePair
   local lenBytes, lenNum, numConverted
   put char 1 to 4 of thePair into lenBytes
   put binaryDecode("N",lenBytes,lenNum) into numConverted
   if numConverted is not 1 then return empty
   return char 5 to (lenNum+4) of thePair
end L

--get the right side of a pair
function R thePair
   local lenBytes, lenNum, numConverted
   put char 1 to 4 of thePair into lenBytes
   put binaryDecode("N",lenBytes,lenNum) into numConverted
   if numConverted is not 1 then return empty
   return char (lenNum+5) to -1 of thePair
end R

*******************

Dar Scott