Writing Extensions

[Mark Waddingham]

On 2017-05-18 18:07, Mark Wieder via use-livecode wrote:
> Didn't find it in the dictionary, but I do see that now in the
> language reference. How would one define a quote constant?
> constant quote is "\q"  ?

Yes.

> The language guide explicitly states "Note: Constants are not
> currently implemented, although the syntax is recognised." What am I
> supposed to make of that?

That's a bug in the language reference - it should say that only literal 
values are supported at present, general (constant) expressions are not.

> That's unfortunate. In LCS I often change the itemdelimiter in order a
> to parse complex strings. The lack of the ability to manipulate things
> at this level is a serious detriment to text parsing, which is one of
> the main strengths of LCS.

Indeed - it is a *great* strength of LCS and is very important in the 
domain of things which are written in LCS. The development of LCB has 
mainly focused on things which LCS cannot do - like calling foreign 
functions and being able to render complex visual representations of 
data with a much lower overhead than is necessary in LCS.

> Ah. So the dictionary isn't a good place to look for things. I'll
> spend some time working my way through the language reference instead.

Heh - as Ali said, the docs and such need a fair bit of work :)

>> Similarly, word and token are 'tokenized chunks' - they action could 
>> be
>> described by a regular expression.
> 
> See above (itemdelimiter).

See above (strengths of LCS vs LCB) :)

Now, I'm not saying that LCB shouldn't have better ways to manipulate 
text - closing the gap between LCS and LCB is an important goal; 
however, it seems wiser to get the things working in LCB which LCS 
cannot do first, before replicating functionality LCS already does 
really well.

Warmest Regards,

Mark.

-- 
Mark Waddingham ~ mark at livecode.com ~ http://www.livecode.com/
LiveCode: Everyone can create apps