On 17 Feb 2008, at 00:50, Christopher Green wrote:

> One of the things AS spoiled me with from early on is
> "whose clauses" (apparently also known as the by-test
> reference form). My question is, for those of you who
> reeeeally know other scripting/programming languages,
> what other languages have this funcionality as a basic
> feature??

Yes, they're cool. But most languages have something similar at a  
basic feature, although probably less wordily expressed than English- 
like AppleScript. In newLISP, for example, a distant cousin of  
AppleScript, you can do much with lists:

   set alist to {"this", "is", "a", "list", "of", "strings"} -- an  
AppleScript list
   (set 'alist '("this" "is" "a" "list" "of" "strings"))      ; a  
newLISP list

For example, find all list elements that satisfy a simple regex filter:

  (filter (fn (e) (find "i[^n]" e 0)) alist)

  -> ("this" "is" "list")

ie anything where an "i" is not followed by "n".  Or find any strings  
that come after "is" in the ASCII sorting order and upper-case them:

   (find-all "is" alist (upper-case $0) <)

  ->  ("THIS" "LIST" "OF" "STRINGS")

AppleScript used not to be able to do this with its own lists. I don't  
know if it now can in Leopard...?

There's always good old SQL:

  "select * from periodic_table where discovered < 1900 and  
percentage_in_earth_crust > 2"