Re: When is "z" != "z" ?

At 8:18 PM -0500 6/5/06, Larry Garfield wrote: >See how the comparison works? It's a purely alphabetic comparison. > >As for the increment, it actually would never have occurred to me to ++ a >string before this thread, honestly. :-) However, what it appears to be >doing (and I'm sure Rasmus will correct me if I'm wrong) is using a "string >base" instead of a numeric base. Thus a++ = b, b++=c, etc. z++ "rolls over" >to the next "digit" (which because it's a string goes to the right rather >than the left), and resets. So just as 9++ rolls over to 10, z rolls over to >aa. > >Does that make more sense? Maybe to you, but not me. In my book, you can't add a positive value to z and produce something that is less than z. For example, "aa" is not greater than "z" -- is it? Besides, what "value" are we adding? There is no incremental "character" in strings and adding two characters doesn't evaluate to anything. In my last post I showed an "actual sequence" which is debatable. It could be interpreted that the infinite set starts at "a, aa, aaa,... " and never reaches "b". Oddly enough, this could be viewed in all sorts of ways. It's probably best if we don't look at characters as numbers. tedd -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ http://sperling.com http://ancientstones.com http://earthstones.com