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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