Ann W. Harrison wrote:

> Thanks Daniel,
>
> One wonders why they don't allow negative lengths so
> we could have things like this...
>
> substring ('abcdefghij' from 12 for -4) => 'ij'

I'm tempted to say that (like some scripting languages) providing a negative
length, instead of making you go back 4 characters and start collecting 4
characters at most, would make you go back collecting 4 characters, then the
result would be
'ji'

C.