length? of issue!

[Siskin-Bot]

Submitted by: Sunanda

in R2 and until recently in R3:
    length? #1
    == 1

Now in R3:

    length? #1
    == 2

Intentional?

1 = length? #1

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^{Imported from: CureCode [ Version: alpha 110 Type: Issue Platform: Windows Category: Datatype Reproduce: Always Fixed-in:none ]
Imported from: metaeducation#1740}

Comments:

Rebolbot commented on Nov 5, 2010:

Submitted by: meijeru

I would argue there is consistency with the other types in any-word!

>> length? /a
== 2
>> length? quote :a
== 2

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Rebolbot commented on Nov 5, 2010:

Submitted by: Sunanda

That makes some sense....If, conceptually, the length of a word! is its molded form.

But then length? :a is a little anomaly...perhaps its length should be zero when a has no value

mold /a
== "/a"

mold #a
== "#a"

mold :a
== "unset!"        ;; so why a length of 2!?

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Rebolbot commented on Nov 5, 2010:

Submitted by: meijeru

You will notice I programmed length? quote :a, just to avoid the unset! problem. You should try mold quote :a, it has a length of 2 allright. The refinement and the issue do not need to be quoted because they are never further evaluated (they are pure literals).

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Hostilefork commented on Apr 11, 2019:

This is resolved in Ren-C because ISSUE! is returned to an ANY-STRING!:

metaeducation/ren-c#980

Allowing one to directly take the length of an ANY-WORD! was tried for a while. Letting words be treated as a kind of read-only series (without a position) has some benefits, but also runs risks of having a symbol be processed accidentally as being something other than atomic.

It is legal in Ren-C to alias the underlying UTF-8 data of an ANY-WORD! into a string cell without making a copy...so as text! 'foo gives you "foo" as a read-only string. Hence, this is what you should do for now instead of directly trying to take the length of a word (or iterate it with FOR-EACH, etc.)

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Hostilefork added the Ren.resolved on Apr 11, 2019

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[Oldes]

length? of issue! (like with other word types) is counted as length of bytes (not code-points) plus 1 (decoration).
It is described here: #2224

>> length? #ša
== 4

>> length? to-binary "ša"
== 3