Re: [PATCH] (?) typeset array[position=index]=value

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@brasslantern.com>]

On Sat, Jun 5, 2021 at 4:06 AM Mikael Magnusson <mikachu@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 6/5/21, Bart Schaefer <schaefer@brasslantern.com> wrote:
> >
> > foo=( [a]=() )
> remove foo[a]

That doesn't make sense.  foo=( [a]=z ) replaces the entire hash table
with a single element.
  foo=( [a]=() [b]=z )
would just be a very verbose way of saying foo=( b z ) ??

> > foo[a]=( z )
> set foo[a] to z
> > foo[a]=( x y )
> error

How is that any more consistent than what we have now?

> > etc.
> there probably aren't more cases

foo[(R)*a*]=( ... )

If we can assign one element to foo[a] with parens, why can't we
assign a list of elements?

> Since we've established that both unset and assignment to an element
> behaves in no way the same already for regular arrays and associative
> arrays, is there any reason to not make assignment to associative
> array slices (with the empty slice) just remove the element? The
> parsing already works and it wouldn't break any existing cases.

We can continue to have that discussion, but IMO that's orthogonal to
whether subscripts are parsed correctly by unset.