From: kasal@... (Stepan Kasal)
Date: 2002-07-11T17:10:39+09:00
Subject: Re: String#split converts string args to regexes -- ?

On Wed, 10 Jul 2002 14:15:03 GMT, Dossy <dossy@panoptic.com> wrote:
> On 2002.07.10, David Alan Black <dblack@candle.superlink.net> wrote:
> > I'm probably OT here, but I'm very curious about this....  What is it
> > in AWK that behaves this way (one-char string as string, multi-char
> > converted to regex)?

> This "odd" behavior comes from the most useful case, not the most
> logical or predictable case.  Perhaps the idea is "inconvenience the
> least amount of uses of split() at the cost of some edge-case
> confusion."

Hello,
	the reson is simple: the one-char separator was there long before
they thought that regex separator might be useful.  So the idea is
"backward compatibility" or "for a historical reason".

Stepan