“it should be deterministic/always the same” this is a very good point, and at this, well, point, I’ve not yet got any opinion.
I modelled the here strings after here documents: first, the first two “<<” are parsed indicating it’s a here document, then the here document delimiter is parsed; if that begins with another “<” it’s stripped off, and a flag is set that it’s a here string (that the delimiter is the document), otherwise, a document is read until the end delimiter. Nowhere did I deliberately do anything wrt. field splitting or not- splitting or joining. I’m somewhat afraid even that, if this is wrong, it’s systematically wrong somewhere… At this point… curious: What do the zsh developers say regarding this? I assume you also contacted them? What does the GNU bash developer say? Did you contact Chet? For that matter, situ (ksh2020), although I could talk to him directly (#ksh on IRC). -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of mksh Mailing List, which is subscribed to mksh. Matching subscriptions: mkshlist-to-mksh-bugmail https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1857195 Title: here string behaviour different in mksh and ksh93 Status in mksh: New Bug description: consider IFS=$'\n' x=(a "b c") cat <<< ${x[*]} cat <<< "${x[*]}" cat <<< ${x[@]} cat <<< "${x[@]}" executing this in mksh (or zsh, incidentally) yields the output a b c a b c a b c a b c (i.e. identical output, always inserting first IFS char between elements, for all variants of accessing all elements of the array) while ksh93 (or bash, for that matter) yields a b c a b c a b c a b c (i.e. `*' behaves different from `@' but double quoting is ineffectual). I am not sure whether this is a bug (either in ksh93 or mksh) but wanted to report this inconsistency and to ask for clarification. what I _would_ have expected to start with is, that the above "here string" commands would yield the same output as print ${x[*]} print "${x[*]}" print ${x[@]} print "${x[@]}" which is neither true for ksh93 nor for mksh. is this all good and well and I am only overlooking something obvious? To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/mksh/+bug/1857195/+subscriptions