Re: Exporting arrays

[Adam Spiers <adam@thelonious.new.ox.ac.uk>]

Andrew Main (zefram@tao.co.uk) wrote:
> Bernd Eggink wrote:
> >   a=(${(s(:))aex})
> >
> >Unfortunately this doesn't work if an array element is empty! Example:
> 
> Both behaviours are useful.  What would really be nice would be to
> make the delimiter a glob pattern, so that both behaviours (and more)
> are available.  That would make the default behave the way you want it,
> which is probably better overall, because if one really wanted the other
> form of splitting then this would become immediately obvious.

Many thanks to all who replied.  If I had had my brain switched
on at the time I would have realised that environment variables
cannot be arrays; I even missed the rather obvious hint that
some shells don't have arrays at all!  Doh.

Anyway, while we're on the topic of making tiny nooks and
crannies of zsh into potential glob patterns, can I ask what's
the deal with the pattern in

    compctl ... -x C[offset,pattern] ...
                       ^^^^^^^

and also for W[] and R[]?

Is that glob patterns also, or something else?  I ask, because I
can't get it working.  I want a condition like C[0,abcd????]
i.e. only completes when the current word is abcd followed by
four other characters (preferably digits only, if that was
possible).  When I try that compctl, it offers no completions at
all :-(

An another related note, can there be some provision in globbing
for the equivalents of the regexps 

    x{n}
    x{n,}
    x{,m}
    x{n,m}

for non-trivial n and m?  At the moment it seems you can only
specify none, one or many.

By the way, if anyone's interested, I'm slowly making
progressing with a patch that implements dabbrev-expand (see my
post on Jan 2nd).  However I'm a complete novice at hacking the
internals of shells, so I'm not sure whether the end product
would be worthwhile even if it worked (although I think the
patch required should be pretty small so maybe there's not too
much scope for error).  Should I join the zsh-workers list?