Re: '$1' indexing.

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@brasslantern.com>]

On Dec 22,  6:08pm, Ray Andrews wrote:
}
} ... I understand what's going on. I'm too new to this to 
} have any strong opinion, but it seems to me that the behavior we see 
} would perhaps be good for '$@' where '$0' is implied, but not for an 
} explicit '$1'.

Yes, that was the intended behavior and that's what the patch implements.
It's already been checked in to the source repository for next release.
 
} FWIW it seems to me that zsh has the 'right idea' when it comes to 
} string splitting. It's true that converting my bash scripts has involved 
} a more laborious coding in zsh (mostly needing to use 'eval')

There are very few places where you ought to need "eval" -- more likely
you should simply have replaced ${var} with ${=var} in those places.

} So what is the current state of zsh development? How many workers are 
} there? Is zsh ascendant? Is ground being gained against bash?

There are three or four people who regularly work on the shell plus a
couple of others who maintain the ports for various linux distributions
and jump in when bugs get filed against their dists.  Beyond that there
are a number of others who contribute sporadically.  We could use some
more regular people; during zsh's most rapid development years we had
several university students working on it, but C is no longer the most-
studied language so that source of energy has faded.

I wouldn't say any particular shell is "gaining ground" at this point,
and none of the developers of any of the shells really looks on it as
a competition anyway.