4GL String handling in general

It seems that I am not alone in my frustration with how 4GL handles strings. Is there anyone else out there who just wishes they could forget all this "CLIPPED" and "USING" stuff and just use simple printf style string formatting? I wasted a couple of hours a few months ago, just to determine that "USING" was not going to get me what I wanted, which was a simply what a printf( "%2.2s", the_string ); I don't remember exactly, but I'm pretty sure 4GL didn't allow me to simply put in the_string[1,2] as one would think (This is an inconsistency isn't it? How can anyone remember if you can do that in an assignment, but not in a DISPLAY statement, or was it a MESSAGE?) I still think ESQL/C was easier to deal with, and certainly more efficient. (Check out how 4GL passes and returns arguments....I know alot of people find pointers in C confusing, but it seems a bigger hurdle to have so many different statements to put stuff on a screen; Once you've built (OR borrowed) a good set of I/O routines in EC, you don't have to worry about it anymore. I do admit Ring menus are very nice and very simple to do in 4GL, but that's about the only area that I have found it stronger (and I keep telling myself that I ought to write a nice ring_menu() function in C, but there's too many other things to code, rather than redesigning wheels that actually work well as they are).