Re: Reading completion manual

[Bruce Stephens <B.Stephens@isode.com>]

"Andrej Borsenkow" <borsenkow.msk@sni.de> writes:

> > I thought namespaces had been discussed before?  What's the objection
> > to allowing "." in variable names, and regarding it as a component
> > delimiter in function/command names?
> 
> I spoke about functions not variables. Variables names are limited to
> alphanumeric, so you can safely use ``.'' as delimiter. Function names can
> be arbitrary (am I wrong?)

I don't see that it matters (practically).  "_" is a non-optimal
choice, since people already use it too much, but some other prefix
would be OK, and it could be "zle." or "compctl." or something (i.e.,
looking like namespaces).

>  Hmm, this isn't a good idea; I
> > quite often use things like "cp $i $i.bak" and stuff.
> 
> If I remember correctly, it should start with a dot. And of course, you can
> use braces as usual
> 
> cp ${.myvars.i} ${.myvars.i}.bak
> 
> But you are right, it can break some scripts

Ah, OK.  That's less confusing than my notion of predeclaring
namespaces.  In that case, functions could do the same---
".zle.path_files"---or whatever.  That's not likely to conflict with
ordinary usage.

> > (So if you have a function foo.WRITE, then that gets called when you
> > try to write to foo.  Something like that, anyway.  A better interface
> > might be to copy the Perl tie ideas---allowing special associative
> > arrays and things as Bart suggested; you wouldn't need name spaces for
> > this, of course.)
> >
> 
> May be, simply add ZSH emulation module to Perl :-))) But yes, what
> you've just described is my long cherished idea.

Yes, it's a natural extension to zsh-with-associative-arrays.  But
it's orthogonal to variable namespaces.