len(right(number, 3))

James Hurley jhurley at infostations.com
Wed Jan 26 12:03:09 EST 2005


Being on the digest version of the list, I am coming in late on this one.

The thing that confused me in the beginning about Run Rev and numbers 
is that they treated in a manner which depends on the context. For 
example if you write:

	put chars 1 to 4 of 123456 into theResult

Then theResult is 1234. Clearly 123456 is being treated as a string 
of characters.

And if you write:

	put  123 & 456 into theResult

Then again these are treated as characters and theResult is 123456.

But if you write:

	put chars 1 to 4 of 123*456 into theResult

Then you find the surprising thing that theResult is 46088

But if you write

	put chars 1 to 4 of (123*456) into theResult

Then theResult is 4608, which is what you would expect. The 
parentheses force an evaluation.

If you want to demand that the characters be treated as characters 
and not numbers, use quotes. Then if you write:

	put chars 1 to 4 of "123*456" into theResult

Then theResult is 123*, as you expect.

Moral: With flexibility comes responsibility.

But the value of being able to treat the number as a string is that 
you can write a handler to format the number. For example, you can 
format 1234467 as 1,234,567 or 1.23 * 10^6 or whatever.

Jim



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