Re: zsh style associative array assignment bug

[Chet Ramey]

On 3/29/21 6:40 PM, Eric Cook wrote:
> On 3/29/21 5:18 PM, Chet Ramey wrote:
> > 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.
>
> Its just when populating that array dynamically with another array
> if that second array didn't contain `v1' hypothetically, the array gets 
> shifted to

OK, how would you do that? What construct would you use in this scenario?

> a=( [k1]=k2 [v2]=k3 [v3]= )
> which i would imagine to be unexpected for the author of the code and would 
> rather
> it error out instead of chugging along.

Wouldn't this be a programming error? If this were a concern, since any
array can have elements with empty values, I would recommend a different
strategy to copy it.

--
``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/