[PD-dev] proposed new "list" object

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Thu, 21 Jul 2005, Frank Barknecht wrote:

> I think I'd prefer "split" over "first" and "last" (but maybe the Lisp
> people would even prefer something else... ;)

In Perl, Python, Ruby, etc., split is a string operation that 
generates a list of strings according to where a certain pattern was 
found. E.g. if the pattern is /\s*-\s*/ which means "a dash surrounded by 
any number of spaces, maybe none", then

 "-hello- blah blah  - foo   bar    -" .split /\s*-\s*/

gives

 ["", "hello", "blah blah", "foo   bar"]

a list of four elements (trailing delimiters are ignored).

The above sample code is in Ruby:
  "" are string delimiters
  // are pattern delimiters
  . means send message
  split is a method selector
  [] are list delimiters
  , are list element delimiters.

The Tcl language has a similar proc split but works like C's strtok() 
instead of using regexp patterns.

A list-oriented split probably should do something similar and thus it 
would need to output any number of lists (possibly bundled in a list 
themselves).

The "split" that Frank suggests, afaik, doesn't exist in the above 
languages; the closest is the "splice" of Perl and the "slice!" of Ruby 
(and I don't know enough Python or Tcl)

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