calc: Compositions

 
 7.8.10 Compositions
 -------------------
 
 There are several “composition functions” which allow you to get
 displays in a variety of formats similar to those in Big language mode.
 Most of these functions do not evaluate to anything; they are
 placeholders which are left in symbolic form by Calc’s evaluator but are
 recognized by Calc’s display formatting routines.
 
    Two of these, ‘string’ and ‘bstring’, are described elsewhere.  See
 Strings.  For example, ‘string("ABC")’ is displayed as ‘ABC’.  When
 viewed on the stack it will be indistinguishable from the variable
 ‘ABC’, but internally it will be stored as ‘string([65, 66, 67])’ and
 can still be manipulated this way; for example, the selection and vector
 commands ‘j 1 v v j u’ would select the vector portion of this object
 and reverse the elements, then deselect to reveal a string whose
 characters had been reversed.
 
    The composition functions do the same thing in all language modes
 (although their components will of course be formatted in the current
 language mode).  The one exception is Unformatted mode (‘d U’), which
 does not give the composition functions any special treatment.  The
 functions are discussed here because of their relationship to the
 language modes.
 

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