[[ as token

[[ as token

[Achim Braemer]

While not beeing active on the developement myself, and not knowing
about the intricacies of implementation, I do have a pretty strong
oppinion about the decision taken so abruptly in 3.0-pre4 to treat `[['
as a token that has to be surrounded by IFS.

The change broke some of my scripts that were using (maybe erroneously)
constructs like `if [[-x zsh ]]; then'. I am quite sure I happens to a
_lot_ of people. So I think the change will not be popular among
just-users like myself, especially since there is just no syntactic
reason why `[[' has to be surrounded by IFS.

So if this change is to be made there should be the possibility to
switch it off with an option. 

This would be a good idea anyway, because when zsh is invoked as ksh or
sh, parsing should be as close to these shells as possible, and scripts
should be enforced to be valid also under ksh or sh.

I am quite concerned that acceptance for the new release will be low if
it crashes very many existing scripts, whatever the good reason may be.
After all, we chose zsh because it is just so much _smarter_ than all
other shells...

-- Achim --


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 Achim Braemer              braemer@doc.physi.uni-heidelberg.de
 Physikalisches Institut    http://doc.physi.uni-heidelberg.de/~braemer
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Re: [[ as token

[Wayne Davison]

Achim Braemer writes:
> This would be a good idea anyway, because when zsh is invoked as ksh or
> sh, parsing should be as close to these shells as possible

Here's what I get running the ksh that came with Solaris 2.5 for x86:

$ if [[-x /usr/local/bin/zsh]]; then echo hi; fi
ksh: [[-x:  not found
$ if [[ -x /usr/local/bin/zsh]]; then echo hi; fi
ksh: syntax error: `;' unexpected
$ if [[ -x /usr/local/bin/zsh ]]; then echo hi; fi
hi

So it looks like we're now much more compatible with ksh and sh (sh treats
"[[-x" the same way, though of course it doesn't parse "[[" by itself).

I think this is a positive step, but then I don't have any scripts that
broke because of this.  We can only guess what the collective response
to this will be.

..wayne..

Re: [[ as token

[Achim Braemer]

Achim Braemer writes on July 29:

Sorry, I was unclear:

 > So if this change is to be made there should be the 
 > possibility to switch it off with an option. 

should be:

 > necessity to switch it on with an option (for ksh compatibility).

-- Achim --