in Alias if you have a grid of lines overlaping but including a shape the surface tool will understand it and just only select parts of curves that will make up the edges of a surface tool.
for example this sketch has 2 short edges and one long unsplit edge
for the loft tool like dont select chain I would like to see spline at 2 being brokend by arc 1

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Byzv_NlyKp_2NjlCbEtLMDRuVzA/edit?usp=sharing
For example if you see this video at 22:17 you see that longer curves are selected but the surface tool only uses edges that make sense for the surface.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YsPRtenDrU