Re: coloring substitution seems to eat next line.

[Ray Andrews <rayandrews@eastlink.ca>]

On 2022-11-11 20:24, Bart Schaefer wrote:
> I've never heard the term "glossary" applied to something like that.


True, as I muse I expand the idea from a glossary to a primer to a grammar.

> This is a glossary:
> https://homepages.uc.edu/~thomam/Intro_Unix_Text/Glossary.html

That looks really good, I'm going to scan it end to end.   Even if it 
was nothing  more, something like that focused on zsh -- or I guess just 
'shell' -- terminology would be invaluable to someone like me.  Probably 
was something like that at one time but its fallen by the wayside since, 
as I said, raw beginners are now so rare.  Really, how many people at my 
level are there now?   I just decided to dive in at the deep end and 
learn to swim by not drowning.  Inside out -- solve one problem at a 
time, and hope that the grammar would reveal itself eventually.  Nope, 
the grammar is too terse, too powerful.  Latin and Greek are 'C' by 
comparison.

> But you seem to want something more like the whole book:
> How about https://homepages.uc.edu/~thomam/Intro_Unix_Text/TOC.html
>
> (Or at least everything from Chapter 9 and later.)
Nope, we already have 'the whole book' that's just the thing, I want the 
language to be able to read the whole book and understand it. Peter's 
'From Bash to Z Shell' was good except that it discussed Bash as much as 
Zsh so it confused and diluted as much as it clarified and explained.
> Indeed, search engine text indexing is lousy at short strings and punctuation.

And that's the unavoidable dilemma.  Zsh uses one or two characters as 
syntactic entities and those same characters might have three or four 
meanings in different contexts so the whole paradigm of the google 
search is just useless.  Nope, hafta read the book.  But manuals are not 
even designed to be helpful they are repositories of information that 
you consult when you know what you are looking for.  The right book will 
have a glossary in it, helpful hints, anatomy lessons, and a 'phrase 
book' -- even if you can't speak German, you can learn to order a beer.  
Build up from simple examples.   Mean time, my only salvation is asking 
you guys for help -- which I always get :-)