Solved: string literals lack string methods - why?

["Dr. Markus Walther" <walther@...>]

Hi,

thanks to the list for clarification - so the surprise was
a syntactic one. Shame on me for not analyzing the exception more closely...

Turns out it _is_ described in the reference manual, albeit a bit
indirectly: p. 14. lists a prefixexp before a colon operator, and
prefixexp in turn is defined on p.10 to require brackets if not a
variable or a function call.

--Markus