Re: easy calling of associative array?

[Ray Andrews <rayandrews@eastlink.ca>]

On 11/04/2015 08:39 AM, Bart Schaefer wrote:
> On Nov 4,  6:48am, Ray Andrews wrote:
> }
> } Historian that I am, I expect that if the writers of the first shells
> } realized how far their work would evolve, they'd have introduced
> } rigorous C-ish scoping and typing at the getgo, since largeish
> } projects sure could use it.
>
> Historically no one would have written that sort of project in shell;
> that's what C was for.  Even functions are a bolt-on to the original
> shells; there was no scoping to consider at the time.
Yeah, that's about what I was saying. Interesting how things evolve past 
what their body plans are really designed for (fruit bats, rhinoceros 
beetles, London street plan), and how those body plans adapt to cope 
with it.  I do now quite understand that there is a limit to how big a 
zsh project should get to be.  Still you know, will all these fantastic 
little build in manipulations that zsh can perform, one might long for 
something that combines that power with the robustness of C type 
checking and so on.  Dunno, maybe that's Python or Ruby--haven't looked 
at them yet.  But the experiments I'm doing now are cool, I've pretty 
much got data arrays being passed by what more or less amounts to a 
'pointer' to look at it tho of course it ain't really a pointer, so it 
satisfies.

>