From: Brian Candler <B.Candler@...>
Date: 2007-04-24T04:37:06+09:00
Subject: Re: Question regarding design of the String Class

On Tue, Apr 24, 2007 at 02:40:09AM +0900, Michael W. Ryder wrote:
> I guess my point was that str[i] behaves totally different from all the 
> other implementations of [].  All of the others return a string.

You clearly know a lot of languages then :-)

As pointed out before, in C, str[i] is an expression whose value is an
integer for the character at position i, exactly as in Ruby.

In Perl, it doesn't do what you expect either:

$ perl -e '$a = "abcde"; print $a[2], "\n";'

$

(what this actually does is extract an element from the array @a, which I
have not initialised, and is completely unrelated to the scalar $a)

> In Business Basic or C if I want the numeric value of a character in a 
> string I specify that.  Likewise if I want to copy a string from an 
> arbitrary position I don't have to specify an ending character like 
> Ruby.  I just find s = t[i, -1] to be much harder to understand in a 
> quick read then s = t[i].  Others may not have this problem.

Personally I would be *very* surprised if str[i] returned all the characters
from 'i' to the end of the string. But then I don't program in Business
Basic.

I do program in C though. If I wanted the string from position i to the end
of the string, I would write str + i, or possibly &str[i]

In Perl you have to be explicit and call substr()

Brian.