typeset verbosity

typeset verbosity

[Peter Stephenson]

Instead of thinking about hard problems for once, I'd like to get rid of
this annoyance from `typeset' or friends on an existing parameter:

% fn() { local foo; local foo; }
% fn
foo=''
% 

How?

(1) Make the display behaviour optional.  If so, decide when to unset
    the option by default, e.g any sh-style emulation.
(2) Make the display behaviour not work inside functions.  (Making it
    not work on local parameters isn't good enough because of the -g
    flag.)
(3) Make it only work with typeset, or at least not work with local.
(4) Some combination of (1) with the others.

Only (1) can ensure POSIX compatibility.  We could add a flag to display
listed parameters instead.

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@csr.com>                  Software Engineer
CSR Ltd., Science Park, Milton Road,
Cambridge, CB4 0WH, UK                          Tel: +44 (0)1223 392070


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Re: typeset verbosity

[Oliver Kiddle]

On 12 Jun, Peter wrote:

> (1) Make the display behaviour optional.  If so, decide when to unset
>     the option by default, e.g any sh-style emulation.
> (2) Make the display behaviour not work inside functions.  (Making it
>     not work on local parameters isn't good enough because of the -g
>     flag.)
> (3) Make it only work with typeset, or at least not work with local.
> (4) Some combination of (1) with the others.
> 
> Only (1) can ensure POSIX compatibility.  We could add a flag to display
> listed parameters instead.

For POSIX, we really ought to be accepting the -p flag which displays
the listed parameters but in a different format (in the form of a
typeset command). This typically being -L in zsh has probably been
significant in this not being done before. It might actually be a good
idea to add -p as an alternate form of -L across many builtins.

One possibility which is an extension of (3) would be to make it only
work on typeset but not for all the other typeset variants and then follow
bash in changing the documentation so declare is the recommended version
of the command (it's a better name anyway in my opinion). The
KSH_TYPESET option could be extended to make typeset also work that way
for ksh compatibility. Additionally, we could perhaps add a flag to
typeset and variants which could explicity control whether set parameters
are listed.

A related annoyance - autoload being a sort of typeset variant - is that
autoload ~/.zfunc/*(N) will not end silently if there are no files in
~/.zfunc. Changing this could perhaps be a part of whatever solution is
chosen.

Oliver

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