From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <72b594bfc91b8b53b4d2793a941fed5c@vitanuova.com>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] rc here docs
From: rog@vitanuova.com
In-Reply-To: <69f5b2e51adfc734027e4cf14ffa8286@collyer.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Date: Tue,  9 Sep 2003 18:12:00 +0100
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 30182478-eacc-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025

the main advantage of here documents as far as i can see is a
syntactic one; it's nicer to see:

cat << EOF
don't care about ' marks.
$home is where the heart is.
EOF

than its near-equivalent:

echo 'don't care about '' marks.
'^$"home^' is where the heart is.' | cat

particularly when you've got lots of text as a template.  balancing
single quotes is very easy to get wrong.

i do sometime regret the lack of here documents in the inferno shell
for that reason (although actually putting them into /tmp seems a
little archaic)

i wonder if there might be room for a "here word" i.e.  something that
is equivalent to a word, but looks syntactically something like a here
document.  dunno what the syntax would look like though.