On 5/10/06, Axel Liljencrantz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 5/10/06, Philip Ganchev <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> foo(seq 1 2)
>
[...] make the above behave instead as a concatenation of
> the strings "foo" and "1 2", namely
>
> foo1 2
>
> Then "foo1 foo2" can be achieved as
By the way, I think this is called "string multiplication".
> foo{"",(seq 1 2)}
>
Wouldn't that result in the elements foo' and 'foo1 2'.
Yes, it would - my bad. You would need to write
foo{(seq 1 2)|sed -r 's/\n/,/g; s/,$//'}
(This is one reason why it makes sense to use spaces as a separator
inside {}; you would just write "foo{seq 1 2)}". In general, it makes
sense to use the same separators everywhere, so that the output of one
command can be fed as input to another.)
My reasoning is that when two strings are adjacent, people expect that
they will be concatenated, not multiplied. And this should work the
same for strings written explicitly (as in "echo foo'1 2'"), as for
results of a command (as in "echo foo(seq 2)").
Moreover, multiplication is less commonly needed, and so should be
done explicitly using { }. I think in the current scheme, there is no
way to concatenate explicitly.
Lastly, with this small change to the expansion semantics, there are
no corner cases like "foo[1 (seq 4 6)]" and no change is needed to the
"set" command.
[...] I see many
problems with the second suggestion:
* Posix-incompatible
Sorry, how is it POSIX-incompatible? Both Sh and Bash work
* Rarely what you want. Array separating on newline if often useful,
at least in my experience.
Sorry, how does newline come into it?
I think the splicing example that started this discussion shows that
string concatenation is more often what you want than string
multiplication. Where is string multiplicatio needed?
At a glance, I agree that it would be nicer to make 'set foo[ 1 (seq 4
7)] a b c d' do what you'd expect, but firstly I don't see how that is
possible without breaking something more fundamental,
Namely what?
and secondly
once you get used to the idea that array slicing piggybacks on regular
parameter expansion - no special treatment - then it seems pretty
intuitive. At least to me. It comes back to having a small
multipurpose syntax.
Certainly, my proposal is in completely in line with that. It is also
more consistent with user expectations, and easier to read, as string
multiplication would be explicit.
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