List Commands Library for 50g

[John Keith]

(03-03-2018 08:35 PM)DavidM Wrote:  Playing around with some other things, it occurred to me that I could benefit from having an equivalent to LSPLT/LRPSL for strings. It was actually pretty simple to overload the existing commands to accommodate strings as well (most of the code was shared between the two object types).

The "L" at the beginning of these command names designates their use for lists, which is no longer the only object type they apply to. Keeping the LSPLT/LRSPL commands names makes sense for backward compatibility, but I'm wondering if it makes sense to create aliases for these commands now that they apply to strings as well. SPLIT and RSPLT perhaps?

Thoughts? Are the aliases even needed?

I strongly approve of overloading those commands (and any others that make sense) to work with strings. I would go in the opposite direction, however, and have SPLIT / RSPLT be the "official" command names and LSPLT/LRPSL be the aliases.

Many built-in commands (e.g. POS and SUB) work with strings and lists. SIZE also works with arrays and exact integers. It has always annoyed me that SREV and REVLIST are two different commands. With Gerald Hillier's ZREV, we now have 3 different command names that should have been one all along.

Basically, the point of my rant is to encourage combining useful operations into as few commands as possible. :-)

John