string methods not working

[darthoctopus]

Minimum working example:

a = 'a'
print, a.startswith('http:')

This works fine on IDL, but on GDL I get the following error:

% Expression must be a STRUCT in this context: F
% Execution halted at: $MAIN$ 

I am using 0.9.9 installed from the AUR.

[maynardGK]

This is a newer feature of IDL which is not in GDL (and wont be there anytime soon).