#173 Add left and right to mutable buffer

[U. Zinngrebe]

re: RFE #468 (http://sourceforge.net/p/oorexx/feature-requests/468/)

Attached patch implements ~left and ~right methods that not only return the data
but also edit the mutable buffer in place.

The patch was made against trunk, svn revision 8278.
I compiled on openSUSE 11.4 (Linux 2.6.37.6-0.20-desktop x86_64) and made
a few manual tests in ooRexxTry.

It would be nice if you could indicate whether you object to the edit-in-place
feature before I make the test groups.

cheers, uli

[Rick McGuire]

I'm not willing to accept adding left and right versions that modify the data, making them inherently different from how substr works. That feature was to add left and right that functioned just in retrieval mode.

I do not, however, object to adding methods under a different name that provided this sort of function ("crop", perhaps).

[Mark Miesfeld]

I agree with Rick's reasoning.

If you go to add a method with the sort of function, maybe discuss the method name a little bit on the developer list to get a good name.