inclusive if statements

[blankout]

I was wondering is it's possible to have an if statement that is inclusive, such as

Turing:

if answer="y" then %...

is it possible to have the user input a word and as long as the word has the letter y in it, the program will run a specific output?

[Tony]

you might be interested in index

[blankout]

so i tried using index, but i don't quite get it, if you can understand what i'm trying to do from this code, can i get any help?

Turing:

var word : string get word : * cls put index (word, "a") cls if index (word, "a") then put word(1..index(word, "a")-1).. put "i"(index(word, "a")..length (word)) end if

[Tony]

index returns an integer value, not boolean (true/false).

[TheGuardian001]

the index command returns an integer value based on where the letter was found in the string, or 0 if the letter was not found. so if we only need to know if the letter was found, what result would we check for?

Edit: Ninja'd by Tony.

[blankout]

well i'm trying to replace all 'a' s in a sentence with 'i's, so what would i need to do in order to produce that result

[Tony]

Start with simplifying the problem. Your teacher might have been saying something like that -- breaking problems down into smaller problems. "Command & Conquer", or something lame like that.

My favourite approach to such problems is recursion / induction.

All you have to do is figure out two things:
1. What is the most basic case for this problem.
2. How can you get one step closer to such a base case.

And those two steps are enough for any size of a problem, 1 to infinity (limited by hardware and time )


1. What is the shortest sentence you can think of, where you would need to replace 'a'?
2. Given a sentence of any length (longer than one in #1), how can you get it to be one letter shorter?