Received: from mail.proteosys.com ([213.139.130.197]) by nummer-3.proteosys with Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.3959); Sat, 24 Jan 2009 21:11:03 +0100 Received: by mail.proteosys.com (8.13.8/8.13.8) with ESMTP id n0OKB19i010073 for ; Sat, 24 Jan 2009 21:11:02 +0100 Received: from listserv.uni-heidelberg.de (listserv.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.100.94]) by relay.uni-heidelberg.de (8.14.1/8.14.1) with ESMTP id n0OK6uVE030760 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA bits=256 verify=NO); Sat, 24 Jan 2009 21:06:56 +0100 Received: from listserv.uni-heidelberg.de (localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1]) by listserv.uni-heidelberg.de (8.13.1/8.13.1) with ESMTP id n0NN1E4m024137; Sat, 24 Jan 2009 21:06:45 +0100 Received: by LISTSERV.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 15.5) with spool id 175794 for LATEX-L@LISTSERV.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Sat, 24 Jan 2009 21:06:44 +0100 Received: from relay.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.100.212]) by listserv.uni-heidelberg.de (8.13.1/8.13.1) with ESMTP id n0OK6i9g029604 for ; Sat, 24 Jan 2009 21:06:44 +0100 Received: from lon1-post-3.mail.demon.net (lon1-post-3.mail.demon.net [195.173.77.150]) by relay.uni-heidelberg.de (8.14.1/8.14.1) with ESMTP id n0OK6asZ030591 for ; Sat, 24 Jan 2009 21:06:40 +0100 Received: from morningstar2.demon.co.uk ([80.176.134.7] helo=[192.168.0.4]) by lon1-post-3.mail.demon.net with esmtp (Exim 4.69) id 1LQom4-0004jq-ev for LATEX-L@LISTSERV.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Sat, 24 Jan 2009 20:06:36 +0000 User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.19 (Windows/20081209) MIME-Version: 1.0 References: <107876.72281.qm@web82004.mail.mud.yahoo.com> X-Enigmail-Version: 0.95.7 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <497B74D2.6080308@morningstar2.co.uk> Date: Sat, 24 Jan 2009 20:06:42 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Joseph Wright Subject: Re: comma lists, semicolon lists, vbar lists To: LATEX-L@LISTSERV.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE In-Reply-To: <107876.72281.qm@web82004.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Precedence: list List-Help: , List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-Owner: List-Archive: X-ProteoSys-SPAM-Score: -2.599 () BAYES_00 X-Scanned-By: MIMEDefang 2.64 on 213.139.130.197 Return-Path: owner-latex-l@LISTSERV.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE X-OriginalArrivalTime: 24 Jan 2009 20:11:03.0614 (UTC) FILETIME=[E20B15E0:01C97E5F] Status: R X-Status: X-Keywords: X-UID: 5636 Paul Thompson wrote: > One lack of LaTeX and friends that I have NEVER understood is that there are no character-manipulation tools. > > In many languages, there are a large number of such tools. > > substr - get part of a string > scan - break string into pieces by several markers (usually can specify) > index - determine if string has substring > > and there are 20-30 more too Part of the issue (I suspect) is that most of these have to be done quite slowly in TeX. So it is often better to do something specific to the issue at hand (for example, a delimited macro). > Admittedly this goes toward making LaTeX more of a programming language, Part of the idea of LaTeX3, so worth adding to the mix. I'd hope that some basics might be in, with the idea of a Lua-based extension being written as well (to gain speed if LuaTeX is available). Joseph