What a Zsh linter should do?

What a Zsh linter should do?

[Sebastian Gniazdowski]

Hello!
I'm wondering about functionality of a possible Zsh linter. Let's say
that the general idea is similar to shellcheck.

I think that the standard functionality – telling user to write a
nicer code – isn't a good one for Zshell. For example: telling user to
use `if' instead of [[ ... ]] && { ... ((1)); } || { ... } – I think
this is wrong for Zshell, where the "density" of code increases as
skills increase, and the programmer is e.g. being able to write a
"dense" one-liner utilizing :-, :+, :#, (M) instead of multi-line
if/else or even [[ ]] && { } || { }.

So what could a Zsh linter actually do?

-- 
Sebastian Gniazdowski
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Re: What a Zsh linter should do?

[dana]

On 23 Nov 2018, at 09:17, Sebastian Gniazdowski <sgniazdowski@gmail.com> wrote:
>I think that the standard functionality – telling user to write a
>nicer code – isn't a good one for Zshell. For example: telling user to
>use `if' instead of [[ ... ]] && { ... ((1)); } || { ... } – I think
>this is wrong for Zshell, where the "density" of code increases as
>skills increase

ShellCheck doesn't tell you to avoid the `foo && bar || baz` construction
because `if` is less dense, it's because many people mistakenly assume that it's
equivalent to `if foo; then bar; else baz; fi`, and their script fails in
unexpected ways as a result. The linter obv has no way of knowing what the
person who wrote the code actually meant, all it can do is warn them that it's
dangerous. Just like `if ( foo = bar ) { ... }` in C-like languages

Anyway, i can't think of any ShellCheck warnings that aren't suitable for zsh,
aside from the ones that are obviously functionally/syntactically irrelevant
(must use [@] with arrays, can't use `{1..$n}`, must quote parameter expansions
to prevent globbing, &c.). All of the other stuff about escaping, and quoting,
and not trying to parse ls, and not doing `echo $(cmd)`, and so on, is just as
valid when writing zsh scripts

dana