On Tue, Jul 31, 2018 at 10:31 PM, Chet Ramey <chet.ra...@case.edu> wrote: > On 7/27/18 7:13 PM, konsolebox wrote: >> Hi Chet, >> >> I wonder if you can allow bash to have another syntax to allow simpler >> declaration and/or definition of associative arrays. The changes >> needed to have it done seem simple enough, and the only conflict it >> makes is a scalar `var={...` assignment, which in my opinion is better >> quoted to make it more readable and less questionable from other >> syntaxes like brace expansion. I believe most people intuitively >> quotes it, and assignments that start with `{` is fairly rare. > > So it's syntactic sugar for `declare -gA a; a=( ... )'?
That surely is one of the main goals, but it's not exact. `declare -gA a; a=(...)` would always affect the main global scope. Example: $ g() { declare -gA a=([x]=y); }; f() { local -A a=(); g; declare -p a; }; declare -A a=([a]=b); f; declare -p a declare -A a=() declare -A a=([x]="y" ) But as shown in my earlier example, a={...} would only affect the nearest scope which was local a={}. This proposal simply requests an intuitively equivalent simple assignment syntax for associative arrays just like a='...' and a=(...), with same behavior for scoping. Maybe we can add another option like -G to have similar effect but that's a little different already. Just allowing a={} would make it simpler for every scripter. -- konsolebox