is "of" optional in transcript ?

[Martin Baxter]

Looking at a script to debug it I noticed the line:

put line (item i of lnum) field "assetlist" into idname

Noticing that I had missed out the word "of", I wondered how that got past
the syntaxt checker and tried:

put line 2 field "assetlist"

in the message box, and it worked without any problem.

I had assumed that "of" was required in chunk expressions, but maybe it is
optional, since this can hardly be an oversight.

Admittedly I'm using RR 2.1.2, and so for all I know this is different in
the current version.
Is it ?

Am I the last to know ?

Martin Baxter