New rc snapshot, includes "the equals hack"

[Tim Goodwin <tjg@star.le.ac.uk>]

A new, and possibly controversial, rc development snapshot is available
from the usual place.

    http://www.star.le.ac.uk/~tjg/rc/snap/rc-1.6s20000811.tar.gz

There are a few minor bug fixes, and the addition of the `-I' flag
from the Plan9 rc (the opposite of `-i': this shell is definitely not
interactive).  See the full list of changes since the last beta at the
end of this message.

In addition, this snapshot includes a cunning patch by Thomas Nordin
that permits `=' to appear, unquoted, outside assignments.  For ease of
reference, I'm calling this "the equals hack", where the word "hack" is
not intended to have any pejorative connotations...

The equals hack, which in fact was just a one line addition to the
grammar, effectively makes `=' stand for `^'='^' (when it's not an
assignment).  The slightly surprising feature of this is that `='
swallows whitespace around it.

    ; echo a = b
    a=b

Apart from that, everything works as you would expect.

    ; dd if=/etc/group |wc
    1+1 records in
    1+1 records out
         44      44     780

    ; sh configure --prefix=/local
    [...]

    ; a=b=c b=c echo $a $b
    b=c c

(All these were previously syntax errors.  The equals hack doesn't
change the meaning of anything that was previously legal.)

What do you think?  Should the equals hack stay?

Tim.


2000-04-19

  Bug: isatty() tests in input.c are relevant to any fd, not just 0.
  Now `. -i /dev/tty' works right.

  Bug: fn sigexit wasn't always cleared in child shells.

  Bug: `~ () '*'' dumped core.

2000-05-25

  Portability: need special runes for read() returning EIO under job
  control systems.

2000-06-20

  Feature: add `-I' flag (definitively not interactive) for
  compatibility with Plan 9 rc.

2000-07-27

  Feature: the "equals hack".