LeVan,Ralph wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: SRU (Search and Retrieve Via URL) Implementors
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
>> On Behalf Of Ashley Sanders
>>
>> Funny that, I got the impression that most people preferred
>> zero-based -- I certainly do. I also prefer start:length
>> because as Mike Rylander points out, it is more "standard".
> 
> Just thought I'd throw in my two cents on the "standard"-ness of the
> substring proposal.  Java is zero-based and uses beginning and ending
> offset.  "dinosaur".substring(1:2) returns "i".
> 
> 
>> Sorry, but no. What you're proposing does have negative numbers and a
>> negative numbers is a special case. If it wasn't a special case you
>> wouldn't have felt the need to add "If <length> is negative, ..."
> 
> Speaking of standardness, would someone care to point me at some
> real-world examples of this?  I've not run into negative offsets or
> lengths in any of the languages I've learned.
> 
> 
>> If you want a substring that works from the end of the string
>> rather than the beginning have both "substring" and "r_substring".
>> Then you'd have no need of negative numbers and special cases.
> 
> If you need this feature, this proposal would get my vote.
> 
> 
> I'd like to ask a meta-question here.  Is anyone going to implement this
> stuff?  I've been reluctant to chime in on some of these topics because

I don't think we'll be implementing it.. Regular expressions suit us 
fine at this point. AFAIK.

/ Adam

> I have neither the ability nor intention of implementing many of the
> things being discussed.  I strongly think that we should NOT be adding
> things to the standard that are not going to be broadly implemented.  We
> have a good extensibility mechanism and I'd suggest that funky features
> should be profiled and implemented as extensions.
> 
> Ralph
> 
>