On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 11:25 AM, Mark Lively <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > Yes, because you are stringing together text items. Normally the text item delimiters are {""} so when you concatenate two > strings together there is nothing between them. No. When you *concatenate* two strings together (with the & operator), there is nothing between them, period: set text item delimiters to ":" "foo" & "bar" -- returns "foobar" The TIDs only come in when you coerce a list to text: {"foo","bar"} as string -- returns "foo:bar" The thing that is confusing with the OP's example is that & is overloaded. When you apply it to things that aren't strings, like folders and files, it creates a list: POSIX file "/" & POSIX file "/bin" -- creates the list { file "Macintosh HD:", file "Macintosh HD:bin: } Converting such a list to a string is thus an example of the second case instead of the first, even though '&' is involved, so the TIDs are inserted. -- Mark J. Reed <[log in to unmask]>