calc: Compositions
7.8.10 Compositions
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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.
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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