Re: zsh style associative array assignment bug

[Chet Ramey]

On 3/27/21 5:02 PM, Eric Cook wrote:
> Hey,
>
> When doing an assignment with an uneven number of elements bash currently 
> silently treat the last element
> as a key and assigns it an empty string.
>
> $ typeset -A ary=(this feature came from zsh); typeset -p ary
> declare -A ary=([came]="from" [this]="feature" [zsh]="" )
>
> In zsh this is an error,
> % typeset -A ary=(this feature came from zsh); typeset -p ary
> zsh: bad set of key/value pairs for associative array
>
> Could bash be adjusted to align with zsh in this case?

I don't think that's a particularly good or elegant aspect of this
syntax to mimic.

If you look at

a=( k1 v1 k2 v2 k3 v3)

as more or less syntactic sugar for

a=( [k1]=v1 [k2]=v2 [k3]=v3 )

it's reasonable that

a=( k1 v1 k2 )

is equivalent to

a=( [k1]=v1 [k2]= ). And that's what bash does.


--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/