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Subject: |
30.0.50; [PATCH] Add support for negative indices and index ranges in Eshell |
Date: |
Sat, 21 Jan 2023 19:47:47 -0800 |
There are two suggestions in the "Bugs and ideas" section of the Eshell
manual:
Allow "$_[-1]", which would indicate the last element of the array
Make "$x[*]" equal to listing out the full contents of "x"
I think these would be pretty useful, especially for the "$_" variable,
which gets the last argument of the last command, but if you give it an
index like "$_[N]", gets the Nth argument of the last command. However,
it's not as easy to get the second-to-last argument of the last command,
or to get *all* arguments of the last command. So the above two
suggestions would be pretty helpful.
Attached is a patch to do this. For the second suggestion, I took some
liberties and added range syntax, so that "$x[2..5]" returns elements 2,
3, and 4 (zero-indexed) of x.
I have just one question though: this implementation treats ranges as
half-open, i.e. "M..N" is [M, N). I think that's the best way of doing
things (and it matches how 'seq-subseq' works). However, "M..N" is the
Bash syntax, which uses a closed range, [M, N]. Maybe this would be too
confusing for users? I'm open to using other tokens aside from ".." if
that would help. Maybe "M:N" would work? That's the Python syntax, which
behaves the same way as this patch. Any thoughts?
0001-Add-support-for-negative-indices-and-index-ranges-in.patch
Description: Text document
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