On 2024-02-03 20:20, Bart Schaefer wrote:
Note that var has NOT acquired the "-i" (integer) attribute, despite
having been assigned a number value.
I noticed that myself.  I expect that all this goes back to ancient history -- arithmetic would have been an add-on at some point and integers were never robustly typed, just scalars subject to special processing, so  ' $(( )) ' says: "treat me mathematically, even tho I'm otherwise just a scalar".  But in my previous post it would seem that 'abc' IS an integer because it increments like one, but even then typeset -p shows it as scalar. It starts as a string assigned to 'var' but it would seem it gets 'promoted' to an integer variable.