Re: Surprising parsing result with anonymous functions and for loops

[Mikael Magnusson <mikachu@gmail.com>]

On 25 September 2014 07:35, Bart Schaefer <schaefer@brasslantern.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 24, 2014 at 3:02 PM, Mikael Magnusson <mikachu@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Okay, so an anonymous function without braces should not possibly be
>> able to take arguments, because they are either part of the single
>> command in the function, or if you have a ;, they are not part of the
>> function definition at all.
>
> That's not quite how it works.  The foo() case is a function
> definition, but the "anonymous" case is simultaneously a definition
> and a call.  In the latter situation, the parser consumes a valid
> function definition, and then anything left over is its arguments.
> Since "for a { echo $a }" is a valid function body, the parse switches
> to looking for arguments after that point.  In the former case, there
> is no implicit function call, so it is an error for anything to be
> left over.
>
> The presence of braces around the entire body simply allows the parser
> to distinguish the body from the arguments.  If there are other
> syntactic clues, those also distinguish body from arguments, e.g., the
> token "done" here:
>
> () for a; do echo $a; done bing bong
>
> Note that the semicolons didn't terminate the function definition,
> because they are part of the for-do-done compound syntax.

Okay, but does anyone at least agree that doing alias expansion at
that point is highly surprising?

-- 
Mikael Magnusson