Re: [Help-smalltalk] unexpected #indexOf:ifAbsent: result (was What am I doing wrong here?)

[Mike Anderson]

Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> 
>> I said this wasn't the finest part of the class library, because (a) you
>> might reasonably expect #indexOf:ifAbsent: and
>> #indexOf:matchCase:startingAt: to be variations on a theme, and they're
>> not; and (b) they're all pretty wordy when all you're wanting to do is
>> some string wrangling.
>>   
> 
> Yeah, I remember thinking about the same when I ported this from IBM
> Smalltalk.  Which makes me think it's now exactly 10 years I've been
> working on GNU Smalltalk.  Wow.

Congratulations, I think.

*dons party hat*

>> My advice, if you are working a lot with strings, is to add a method
>> like this:
>>
>> CharacterArray methodsFor: 'syntactic sugar'!
>>
>> % aSubString
>>     ^self indexOfSubCollection: aSubString
>> ! !
>>
>> Now you have:
>>
>> st> 'a/b' % '/' !
>> 2
>>   
> 
> While I agree entirely with you, why the "%"? :-P

I was looking for a binary selector. I seriously considered @? but
settled on % because it suggests modulo division... this made sense at
the time :-I

'Interesting' choice of selectors aside, it's really the ease of doing
this that I was trying to draw attention to.

Mike