problem with counting words

[larry at significantplanet.org]

Hello Kay,
Mark gave me a short explanation of why it is good to see the words within 
quotes as one word and now you've given a longer and more detailed 
explanation.
So I thank you and I will stop throwing rocks at my computer.
Larry
P.S. I still want to understand how to write my own functions that I can use 
right within any script of any stack.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Kay C Lan" <lan.kc.macmail at gmail.com>
To: "How to use LiveCode" <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com>
Sent: Sunday, October 12, 2014 7:58 PM
Subject: Re: problem with counting words


> On Mon, Oct 13, 2014 at 7:45 AM, Richard Gaskin 
> <ambassador at fourthworld.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>> I hear ya', but like so many other oddities in the language this one came
>> from Apple,
>>
>
> Sheer brilliance! One of the first analogies of HyperCard was that it was 
> a
> an electronic rolodex. Here is a list of names:
>
> Abu Musab    Al-Zarqawi
> Camilla Parker-Bowles
> Catherine    Zeta-Jones
> Claude Levi-Strauss
> D'Arcy    Corrigan
> Daniel  Day-Lewis
> David    Ben-Gurion
> Dodi Al-Fayed
> Florence    Griffith-Joyner
> Gilbert  O'Sullivan
> Gloria    Macapagal-Arroyo
> Jean-Claude Van Damme
> Jimmy    O'Dea
> Justine  Henin-Hardenne
> Kareem    Abdul-Jabbar
> Karim Abdul-Jabbar
> Kristin    Scott-Thomas
> Maddox  Jolie-Pitt
> Michael    O'Leary
> Olivia Newton-John
> Peter    O'Toole
> Sinéad O'Connor
> Tim    Brooke-Taylor
> Ralph Twistleton-Wykham-Fiennes
>
> So lets say you want to sort these by surname - a kind of rolodex thing to
> do.
>
> sort lines of myListOfNames by word  of  -1 each
>
> will result in only one mistake
>
> sort lines of myListOfnames by trueword -1 of each --if you are on LC7.0
>
> will result in basically the same messed up result most other programming
> languages will give you. Put it in and word processor and see how you go.
>
> Please feel free to try and write your own function that is more 
> successful
> and more efficient than the beautiful one liner Bill Atkinson gave us. 
> Even
> if you had wordDel it wouldn't help much. I can't imagine the amount of
> hours that have been wasted, especially on genealogical websites, trying 
> to
> unfathom why double barrelled names never sort correctly. This is also
> compounded by the certain fact that some people will put a space between
> the last given name and the Surname, some a tab, and some will 'format' 
> the
> data by placing multiple spaces in between names so that things 'line up
> nicely' - and are then confused as to why it only looks that way on their
> screen an not on someone else's. One of the reasons double barrelled names
> have picked up the '-' is to help computers recognise them as a single 
> word.
>
> Also;
>
> put myVariable into fld Not A Variable
>
> doesn't work
>
> put myVariable into fld "Not A Variable"
>
> does. The ability to recognise words in quote as a single entity is
> extremely important. Yes, we don't typically think of such as a single
> word, but when we understand that computers don't think like us, and we do
> understand why things are the way they are, such oddities can be
> manipulated in many powerful ways to our own advantage. It is also helpful
> when we understand such things that we don't go around replacing one
> character willy nilly with another character. ~ [tilde] for instance is 
> one
> character I'd never use as it has a special meaning in many computer
> languages; as does / \ < > . * and many others. If we had some text that
> contained both straight and curly quotes and replaced the straight quotes
> with curly quotes so we could get a word count, and then changed the curly
> quotes back to straight quotes, the finL text is not the same as it 
> started
> - and this could cause problems. Today your function might work perfectly
> for today's problem, but next month, or next year, when you start 
> expanding
> your LC skills and try working with SQL databases, or Servers and network
> connections, every now and then someone will report a bug that your app
> does something strange. You may never be able to track it down because it
> just happens that once every million DB calls a random user happens to use
> data that contains a character that you never use yourself and thought no
> one else would. I have a particular liking to numToChar(127) myself.
>
> Yep, no other programming language might define a word like LC defines a
> word, but I for one am EXTREMELY thankful for that.
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