Re: curiosity with here document.

[Ray Andrews <rayandrews@eastlink.ca>]

On 11/26/2015 05:56 PM, Bart Schaefer wrote:
> On Nov 26,  3:19pm, Ray Andrews wrote:
> }
> } lesson learned.
>
> Except it's the wrong lesson!
Well no, it is a lesson to be careful trying to use here-docs to comment 
blocks. As to why it goes off the rails, I was close to understanding it 
anyway--I'd expect legal code like that to have some sort of truth 
value, inconvenient as it may be.  I'm not really surprised by the 
correct understanding.
>      function three_commands {
> 	command1; command2; command3
>      }
>      if three_commands; then ...
Sure, but in practice I don't think we see that sort of 'list' after an 
'if' very often.  It seems that only the truth value of the last 
statement is acted upon as far as any 'if-then' structure, so as I said, 
the original 'if' seems to be orphaned.  So what?  It's me put the 
parser into that strange position, I'm not bitchin', it did what it had 
to do. Don't want orphan tests?  Don't make them.
> And second, that [[ ... ]] is just a command like any other command,
> it's not magically connected to "if".

That's the sort of fact that one might think one understands without 
really understanding it.  I probably can't hardly help C-ing it the C 
way.  I appreciate these deep corrections.
> And third, that a here-document is just the standard input of the
> command it follows, so
>
>      : <<END
>      some stuff
>      END
>
> is (again for purposes of determining truth value) the same as
>
>      :

Yeah, I'm really not as thick as I seem about this.  Wanting the 
'comment' to be available at any point wasn't realistic. Not one of my 
better questions.

BTW, I wish there was a way of going back to the archives and deleting 
lousy questions, I'd sure cut out a pile of mine. Library of Babel.