Not your grandmother's NEdit

[Tony Balinski]

I've a new patch for the macro language (yet another). You can find it here:
http://ajbj.free.fr/nedit/nedit5.5dev/patches/MultipleAssignment.diff

I didn't patch the help file yet, but here's the jist (taken from the patch
file):

Assign multiple lvalues in one statement

    This patch allows you to assign a set of variables in a lvalue list from
the content of an array. This has the appearance of a tuple. The keys used to
retrieve the values from the array expression on the right are numeric values
starting with 1. If a key is missing, your macro will fail.

    Given the following (implemented as new built-in functions in this patch):
	    define args {
	        return $args
	    }
	    define n_args {
	        i = 0;
	        while (i in $1)
	            ++i
	        return i
	    }
    You can assign a list of symbols to the content of such an array using a
list assign, thus:

	    (x, y, z) = args(a, b, c)

    This is equivalent to

	    x = a
	    y = b
	    z = c

    This technique can be useful for retrieving argument values in your
functions:

	    (str, regex, count) = $args

or for returning "tuples" from them:

	    define myfunc {
	        ...
	        return args(isOk, message)
	    }
	    ...
	    (success, msg) = myfunc()

If you need to count the number of variables that can be assigned in this way,
use the n_args() function:

	    ...
	    result = myfunc()       # we expect result is an array
	    if (n_args(result) >= 2)
	        (success, msg) = result
====
I forgot to mention you can also assign to array members, eg

    (a, b, c["hello","there"]) = ("forA", "forB", "forC")

Tony