Bay Six Software

[Brent]

Hi all,

I'm in the process of re-evaluating the choices of metastrings—the names for commonly-used strings that can differ by platform or are difficult for some people to remember. Below is a partial reproduction of the Metacharacters and Metastrings article.

I'd like to know your opinions on my choices and whether you would like to see anything changed or added to what I have now.

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Constant metastrings

Metastring	Meaning	Equivalents
$L or $LF	Line feed	$10 $HA $O12 $B1010
$N or $NL	Newline	(Platform-dependent)
$R or $CR	Carriage return	$13 $HD $O15 $B1101
$T or $TAB	Horizontal tab	$9 $H9 $O11 $B1001

Magic metastrings
Certain metastrings have values that change depending on factors such as where you place them. The following table summarizes these "magic" metastrings.

Metastring	Meaning
$DATE	The date during compilation in UTC
$FILE	The name of the source file
$LINE	The line number within the source file
$OWNER	The name of the class, object, trait, or module
$PROC	The name of the procedure
$TIME	The time during compilation in UTC

Changed the subject

[STPendl]

[Brent]

Stefan, technically there are at least four ways to specify any one-character string, as can be seen under the "Equivalents" column of my table. The mnemonics would add a fifth or sixth.

As I was writing this, it occurred to me that the article I linked to above misuses the term "metacharacter". Metacharacters in VF have a parallel construction to mnemonic metastrings. For example, `Cr` would represent the value 13. Single characters such as `C` and `r` would have the values 67 and 114, respectively.

Now I need to rewrite the first part of the article and come up with a term to describe those features of a string literal.

[STPendl]

Sorry for being unclear, I was referring to the metastring column

I would not add another equivalent

[Brent]

So, my thinking now is to keep most mnemonic metastrings as two or more letters. Newline will be $N because it's special.

I'm also seriously thinking of changing the metacharacter syntax from `A` or `Cr` to %A and %Cr, respectively. My thinking here is that $ represents a string whether it is placed before (metastring) or after (string variable). Since % already represents integer variables, it could be used in the same way a metastring uses $.

The only con to using % I can see would be when used with a space. The current form lets you say ` ` while the proposed form would ignore any whitespace character. Though I suppose I could make it that a solitary % implies the space character.

[STPendl]

Why would one need two characters for a space?

[Brent]

Stefan, the parser ignores whitespace characters between tokens, as is usual for most modern programming languages. This means that a token can neither begin nor end with a whitespace character.

However, I'm having second thoughts about using % as I have previously described. It just isn't giving me a good feeling. So, I'll probably be returning to the backtick.