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From: "Bart Schaefer" <schaefer@brasslantern.com>
Message-Id: <990126163743.ZM25602@candle.brasslantern.com>
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1999 16:37:43 -0800
In-Reply-To: <990126162520.ZM25560@candle.brasslantern.com>
Comments: In reply to "Bart Schaefer" <schaefer@brasslantern.com>
        "Re: Example function" (Jan 26,  4:25pm)
References: <19990126184200.B27794@fysh.org> 
	<990126162520.ZM25560@candle.brasslantern.com>
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To: "Bart Schaefer" <schaefer@brasslantern.com>, Phil Pennock <comet@fysh.org>,
        Zsh Development Workers <zsh-workers@sunsite.auc.dk>
Subject: Re: Example function
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X-Mailing-List: <zsh-workers@sunsite.auc.dk> 5038

On Jan 26,  4:25pm, Bart Schaefer wrote:
> Subject: Re: Example function
> (One of the things on the associative-array wishlist is "reverse pattern"
> lookup, that is, treat the array keys as patterns and match them against
> the subscript.  Then you could do silly stuff like
> 
> 	typeset -A map
> 	map=('*.(gz|Z)'	zcat
> 	     '*.bz2' 'bzip2 -dc'
> 	     '*.bz' 'bzip -dc'
> 	     '*' '<')
> 	eval ${(q)map[$argv[i]]} '$argv[i]'
> 
> where I'm using (q) as the fictional reverse-pattern query flag; probably
> there's a better letter.)

Incidentally, the reason this isn't there already is that associative arrays
are unordered hashes, so you can't predict _which_ pattern will match the
subscript when you do the query -- '*' might match before '*.bz' is tried.