Re: More rabbit-holes with unset variables

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@brasslantern.com>]

On Thu, Nov 26, 2020 at 1:21 PM Felipe Contreras
<felipe.contreras@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I asked who objected to the specific behavior I quoted.

I'm not going to dig through the austin-group archives to try to
distinguish which of the two parts of the quoted behavior (inherit, or
otherwise not set) was the source of anyone's objection.  I concede
that the explanatory paragraph in the rationale did not call out
either of those behaviors.

The point is that none of what we're discussing is an agreed-upon standard.

> On Thu, Nov 26, 2020 at 2:42 PM Bart Schaefer <schaefer@brasslantern.com> wrote:
>
> > so a the only useful "declared but not set" variable is a simple
> > scalar.
>
> And by scalar I suppose you mean string.

I mean the simplest form of what zsh refers to as "scalar" internally.
Yes, that's ordinarily representable in C by "char[]", but in the
abstract that doesn't matter.

On the other hand, the shell language doesn't really deal in anything
else.  Everything is designed around file descriptors and argv
(char[][]) and performing implicit string splitting/catenation, and
except for nameref in ksh there's no way to pass pointers around.