From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from proxy4.ba.best.com ([206.184.139.15]) by hawkwind.utcs.utoronto.ca with SMTP id <44234>; Tue, 15 Aug 2000 01:49:33 -0500 Received: from rakitzis.com ([207.20.242.213]) by proxy4.ba.best.com (8.9.3/8.9.2/best.out) with ESMTP id WAA12721; Mon, 14 Aug 2000 22:42:36 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from byron@localhost) by rakitzis.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) id WAA10934; Mon, 14 Aug 2000 22:41:52 -0700 Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 01:41:52 -0500 From: Byron Rakitzis Message-Id: <200008150541.WAA10934@rakitzis.com> To: rc@hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu, tjg@star.le.ac.uk Subject: Re: New rc snapshot, includes "the equals hack" 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.