Re: [9front] new rc parser: do we want it?

["Ethan Gardener" <eekee57@fastmail.fm>]

On Wed, Oct 7, 2020, at 4:54 AM, sl@stanleylieber.com wrote:
> > and unquoted '=' is allowed after the
> > first word:
> >
> > echo a=b
> 
> fwiw, when aiju suggested this a couple years ago i made a
> big stink about how this breaks the predictable quoting
> rules, but if rsc is dispensing with regularity, i don't
> know what to say anymore.  i suppose it's just one more thing to
> remember.

"this breaks the predictable quoting rules" has me a little concerned, but i'm not sure how it does. '=' behaves differently on either side of the first non-assignment word anyway. in the way i look at it, there's nothing to lose; it's already irregular. ;)

even if i'm wrong about that, i'd still be in favour of the change because the old way means urls typically break the convenience of 'send'. at one time, this was a big issue for me. still, my 9front use has dropped to nil, so my opinion's worth nothing unless anyone else feels the same. thinking about it just develops my forth ideas. i've got regular syntax, i can turn the rest of the line into a string and keep it on the stack to work with send (or even pull in the clipboard directly), but optional arguments are not so easy. ;) the fix is probably to break things down into even smaller parts.