Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2001 15:55:10 -0700
From: Jim Balter <###@###.###>


The Java folks decided to "borrow" the split function from Perl.
Unfortunately, their appears to have been some misunderstanding of
the Perl functionality. According to the Java 1.4 documentation at
 
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4/docs/api/java/util/regex/Pattern.html

  The input "boo:and:foo", for example, yields the following results with these parameters:

  Regex Limit Result
     : 2 { "boo", "and" }

But this is *not* what Perl's split does, and misses the
point of the "limit" argument. The perl program
 
perl -le 'print join(" ", split(":", "boo:and:foo", 2))'

prints

boo and:foo

*not*

boo and
 
The point of the "limit" argument is to limit the number
of times the pattern is applied, so that, e.g., only the
first ':' is treated as a separator. But the Java version
doesn't provide this functionality, and this disparity will
cause confusion for people who are exposed to both languages.

Thanks for your time and attention.