[PD] heads or tails?

[Adam T. Lindsay]

Hi folks.
Newbie question here.

I was wondering if there's a regular way of extracting the head and the
tail (meaning everything but the first element... think car/cdr) of an
arbitrary list message. I'm rooting through the docs, and am not able to
come up with an elegant way of doing this. (looked through the past two
months of archives, and didn't find much)

I'm running on Mac OS X (yay!), so I'm not terribly excited about
externals that provide a way to do this, but abstractions would be useful.


Why do I want to do this? 
I'm trying to write an abstraction that takes in a netreceive and
dispatches it to a receiver that's labelled with the first name in the
list, e.g. a netsend of:

  foo bar baz;

...results in a message of "bar baz" being sent to [r foo].

I have a hack with a set number of arguments making heavy use of
[trigger], variable substitution, and "add2" and "set" message boxes, but
I can't get it to work with arbitrary-length messages.

Thanks in advance,
adam

-- 
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 Adam T. Lindsay                      atl at comp.lancs.ac.uk
 Computing Dept, Lancaster University   +44(0)1524/594.537
 Lancaster, LA1 4YR, UK             Fax:+44(0)1524/593.608
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