Feature Exchange for Array extensions (Was Re: Delete the first entry of an array.)

[Paul Dupuis]

On 3/25/2016 4:03 AM, Peter TB Brett wrote:
> Would anyone be interested in a Feature Exchange for adding some new
> array operators (such as push and pop) to the language?
>
>                                          Peter

I'm not very interested in a push and pop functions, but what I have
been wanting for quite some time is really good row and column
operations on 2 dimensional numerically index arrays.
LC Bugzilla entries 670, 4623, 7243, and 9950 are a few enhancements
requests related to this need

I really want to have chunk expressions for a 2D array, such as "put row
3 of somearray into tVar" OR, the really handy one, "put column 5 of
myArray into AColumn" and even things like "get word 2 of first row of
last column of anotherarray"
Similar with "delete row 7" or "put empty into column 6" or " put 0 into
column 6" (replace all cells in column 6 with zero). Also an associated
modifications to "split" and "combine" to turn delimited (typically tab
and cr) data into a 2D numerically indexed array and 2D numerically
index arrays into delimited data

Obviously, these functions can be coded (and have been) as LC script
handlers, but I find myself working with table data frequently enough
that I really would like them to be part of the engine.