On 4/9/12 9:07 PM, Linda Walsh wrote:
>
>
> Maarten Billemont wrote:
>
>> Any particular reason for not removing old undocumented functionality,
>> or is that mostly the nature of this beast - dragging along and maintaining
>> ancient code for the sake of compatibility?
>
> So 'yesturday' is "ancient" for you?... that's really means something.
You have a peculiar view of history (spelling and grammar, too, but we'll
leave that aside).
>
> In doing a scan over my /usr partition,
> I see MANY examples in bash 4.1 in it's examples of using $[] -- I would
> hardly call 4.1 "ancient".
True, I never went back and changed the examples.
>
>
> Other packages that make use of the syntax:
>
> * wondershaper
> * cifs file system
> * alsa (sound)
> * fonts-config (this is a new project within the past few years)
> * QT4
> * GoogleBrowser (chromium)
> * RPM
> * YP
> * PM Utils
> * RPMrebuild
> * iproute2 (almost all modern internet functions on linux)...
> * dhcp-client
> - (zsh -- not a real example, but might become alternate system shell if bash
> killed $[] support)
> * Opera - ? (has comment "TODO use $(()) instead of $[] whenever
> possible;...) "whenever possible??"
> * samba
> and a HUGE number in
> ** linux-kernel -- all over the place...
>
> At that point, I was getting too many to keep up with ... so I stopped
> searching...
>
> $[] has is -- I would bet, Universally, used MORE than $(())...
I believe you'd lose, but it's unprovable either way. Consider the fact,
though, that bash and zsh support $[...], ksh93 and dash support only
$((...)), but that all four support $((...)).
> Chet -- you should get back to the posix folks and tell them posix is to be
> 'descriptive of usage' (their words), not prescriptive. Just because ksh
> did it differently from everyone else's usage doesn't mean they should go
> with that syntax...
You have got to be kidding. Don't you realize you're talking about
decisions that are nearly 20 years old? That $[...] was a Posix
invention that only ever appeared in P1003.2d9? That the $((...))
syntax was adopted officially for P1003.2-1992? That's 1992. Twenty
years ago.
Bash, and later zsh, implemented $[...] because there was no other
syntax at the time, and to gain some operational experience with
arithmetic expansion in the shell. Bash-1.14 (the oldest I have
readily available) lists both forms of arithmetic expansion, but by
the time bash-2.0 was released in 1995, the manual referred only to
the $((...)) form. That's 17 years ago. Hardly "yesterday".
Now, it's hardly any problem to keep dragging the $[...] syntax along.
It takes only a few dozen bytes of code. I have no plans to remove it.
But let's not kid ourselves: it's revisionist history to think that
$[...] was widespread before Posix so callously stamped it out.
> Geez.
Indeed.
--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, ITS, CWRU c...@case.edu http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/
