From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 24649 invoked from network); 10 Jun 1998 10:49:40 -0000 Received: from math.gatech.edu (list@130.207.146.50) by ns1.primenet.com.au with SMTP; 10 Jun 1998 10:49:40 -0000 Received: (from list@localhost) by math.gatech.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) id GAA05052; Wed, 10 Jun 1998 06:43:53 -0400 (EDT) Resent-Date: Wed, 10 Jun 1998 06:43:53 -0400 (EDT) From: Zefram Message-Id: <199806101044.LAA12918@taos.demon.co.uk> Subject: Re: Associative arrays, structured namespaces To: b.stephens@isode.com (Bruce Stephens) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 1998 11:44:51 +0100 (BST) Cc: zsh-workers@math.gatech.edu In-Reply-To: from "Bruce Stephens" at Jun 10, 98 11:24:05 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL25] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Resent-Message-ID: <"wXnL73.0.qE1.eDcVr"@math> Resent-From: zsh-workers@math.gatech.edu X-Mailing-List: archive/latest/4084 X-Loop: zsh-workers@math.gatech.edu Precedence: list Resent-Sender: zsh-workers-request@math.gatech.edu Bruce Stephens wrote: >This strikes me as an excellent idea. Presumably the implementation >is similar to that of associative arrays, though? No. The way it's done in Elate, the shell just treats the structured variable name as an opaque string. It's only convention that interprets the name as having structure. Associative arrays is a completely separate issue. >What's then needed is some way of tying these names to other names, so >that PATH connects correctly to shell.path and so on. That's relatively easy. We already have some support for linked parameters. > This would be a >good opportunity to generalise things a bit, and allow arbitrary shell >functions to be called when a variable gets set or read, and stuff >like that. I'd like to do that too. -zefram