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 > >