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From: dave.l@mac.com
Subject: Re: [9fans] late to the party - Here docs
Date: Thu,  8 Nov 2007 00:37:17 +0000
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
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> from your example, i'm not so sure why this
>
> 	{
> 		echo select $blah blah';'
> 		echo $imbibe_rat_urine
> 	}|mysql --blah-blah
>
> is so terrible.
>


It's not, but it's still uglier ...


> it turns out that you can use a here document in a loop
>
> 	; for(i in 1 2 3)
> 		cat <<!
> 		fu
> 		!
> 	fu
> 	fu
> 	fu
>

Close, but no coconut.  What does:
	for(i in 1 2 3)
		cat <<!
		$i
		!
do?


> but it doesn't work if you use curly braces
>

Yeesh!  Nice detective work!
I see from later detective work it does work, but not in an obvious way:
IIRC sh slurped all the pending heredocs in orders when the lexer(!)  
saw an unquoted newline,
which makes much more sense, but not in a syntactic way, IYSWIM.


> since nobody's bothered to fix this, it's likely that it's just not  
> used
> very much.
>

You're totally right.
OTOH, looking at rc has given me a bit of a software itch ...
I keep thinking "There's gotta be a neater/cleaner/faster way to do  
here documents, argument parsing, globbing, ...".

My "need" for a plan9 system to scratch that itch is increasing:-) ...

DaveL