Re: Getting act together on strings

[Daniel L. Weinreb <dlw at MIT-AI>]

(To prevent duplication, I'm just sending this to LISP-FORUM.)

The reason for the Lisp Machine's string functions using an END instead
of a COUNT has nothing to do with architectural considerations.  It's
simply been my experience that I very nearly always happen to have a
variable whose value is the last character of something, rather than a
variable whose value is the number of characters following some other
point.  When I was using PL/I, which uses COUNTS, I very nearly always
had to compute the count by subtraction.  I think this experience
reflects the increasing use of "free-format fields" rather than
"fixed-format fields" in our software design; we use delimiter
characters and tokens rather than putting things in columns 45 through
49.