On Thu, 2 Mar 2000, Malcolm Beattie wrote:
> Pity. I hadn't looked into how you do the parsing. On the other hand,
> could you not simply store the separator as the first character of
> every option string?
Logically, of course, yes. But at the moment there is no distinction at
string reading time between a plain string and a string that is a list.
And of course some strings are expanded before they are treated as
lists.
A trick that might work could be something along the lines of
"If a list begins with >x where x is any non-alphanumeric character,
then x is used as the list separator."
So you just say
some_option = >;aaaa;bbbb;cccc
other_option = >+aaaa+bbbb+cccc
or even
third_option = >"aaaa"bbbb"cccc
I don't think this would cause trouble; I don't think any existing items
in lists can legitimately start with a > character.
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@??? Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
