Re: New rc snapshot, includes "the equals hack"

[Byron Rakitzis <byron@rakitzis.com>]

Paul and I sought an "equals hack" back in 1992 or so but for some reason
we were unable to come up with something clean.

The "equals hack" solves the "dd bug" and the "make bug" which are the two
most frequent uses of equals sign on the command line, at least for me.

As for the unexpected gluing of = to its neighbors, I suppose that is
the lesser evil -- rc already has this notion of "free carets" so it's
a bug which at least makes sense in that context.

I think what prevented me from doing this a while ago is that I was
trying to fix lexing of '=' in the lexical analyzer: this would have made
the scanning of '=' context-sensitive and it would avoid the unexpected
behavior of free-careting '=' to its neighbors. But, after some effort
I wasn't able to get this to work in a satisfactory way. It certainly
wasn't a one-line fix.

I don't know, what do other people think? In practical use, I can't see
that the equals hack is a bad thing.

You could always separate out the equals by quoting:

	echo a '=' b

Of course, the equals hack also has some non-obvious side-effects:

; echo a=  
syntax error
; echo a==
syntax error
; echo a==b
syntax error
; 

One thing is for sure, it's a hack...

Byron.