Comment about "do" (was clickLine/clickcharchunk)

[Peter M. Brigham]

All this makes some sort of sense if you pay attention to the "parts of speech" aspect in the LC dictionary entries. "The foundfield" is a function, and so it's not surprising that the parser objects to something like "put random(99) into the foundfield." If you look at the entry for "the selection" it's listed as a keyword, and there is a specific note that although it's implemented internally as a function it can be used as a referenced container.The engine appears to handle "the selection" quite differently, performing an extra evaluation when the term is used as a noun (the object of the preposition "into"). I wonder why Scott Raney made this exception? But it's quite useful.

-- Peter

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


On May 7, 2013, at 10:58 PM, J. Landman Gay wrote:

> On 5/7/13 7:06 PM, dunbarx at aol.com wrote:
> 
>> When I first started with LC, one of the first things I tried was to
>> see if something like the first construction above processed  "like
>> it should". I think I tested "the foundField". I was astonished that
>> it did not. Is there is something deeply ingrained in the way this
>> type (all types?) of parsers work that it can not do this?
> 
> I'm not sure how any parser could tell if you meant the variable to be a container or the value that's in it. "Get the clickline" is just a shortcut for "put the clickline into it". So you have:
> 
>  put the clickline into it
>  put random(99) into it
> 
> which is functionally the same as:
> 
>  put "abc" into it
>  put "def" into it
> 
> What we really need is a mind-reading processor. I could have used that today.
> 
> -- 
> Jacqueline Landman Gay         |     jacque at hyperactivesw.com
> HyperActive Software           |     http://www.hyperactivesw.com
> 
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