Re: status on $[arith] for eval arith vsl $((arith))??

[Chet Ramey]

On 4/9/12 9:07 PM, Linda Walsh wrote:
> 
> 
> Maarten Billemont wrote:
> 
>> Any particular reason for not removing old undocumented functionality,
>> or is that mostly the nature of this beast - dragging along and maintaining
>> ancient code for the sake of compatibility?

> 
> So 'yesturday' is "ancient" for you?... that's really means something.

You have a peculiar view of history (spelling and grammar, too, but we'll
leave that aside).

> 
> In doing a scan over my /usr partition,
> I see MANY examples in bash 4.1 in it's examples of using $[] -- I would
> hardly call 4.1 "ancient".

True, I never went back and changed the examples.

> 
> 
> Other packages that make use of the syntax:
> 
> * wondershaper
> * cifs file system
> * alsa (sound)
> * fonts-config   (this is a new project within the past few years)
> * QT4
> * GoogleBrowser (chromium)
> * RPM
> * YP
> * PM Utils
> * RPMrebuild
> * iproute2 (almost all modern internet functions on linux)...
> * dhcp-client
> - (zsh -- not a real example, but might become alternate system shell if bash
>  killed $[] support)
> * Opera - ? (has comment "TODO use $(()) instead of $[] whenever
> possible;...) "whenever possible??"
> * samba
>    and a HUGE number in
> ** linux-kernel -- all over the place...
> 
> At that point, I was getting too many to keep up with ... so I stopped
> searching...
> 
> $[] has is -- I would bet, Universally, used MORE than $(())...

I believe you'd lose, but it's unprovable either way.  Consider the fact,
though, that bash and zsh support $[...], ksh93 and dash support only
$((...)), but that all four support $((...)).

> Chet -- you should get back to the posix folks and tell them posix is to be
> 'descriptive of usage' (their words), not prescriptive.   Just because ksh
> did it differently from everyone else's usage doesn't mean they should go
> with that syntax...

You have got to be kidding.  Don't you realize you're talking about
decisions that are nearly 20 years old?  That $[...] was a Posix
invention that only ever appeared in P1003.2d9?  That the $((...))
syntax was adopted officially for P1003.2-1992?  That's 1992.  Twenty
years ago.

Bash, and later zsh, implemented $[...] because there was no other
syntax at the time, and to gain some operational experience with
arithmetic expansion in the shell.  Bash-1.14 (the oldest I have
readily available) lists both forms of arithmetic expansion, but by
the time bash-2.0 was released in 1995, the manual referred only to
the $((...)) form.  That's 17 years ago.  Hardly "yesterday".

Now, it's hardly any problem to keep dragging the $[...] syntax along.
It takes only a few dozen bytes of code.  I have no plans to remove it.
But let's not kid ourselves: it's revisionist history to think that
$[...] was widespread before Posix so callously stamped it out.

> Geez.

Indeed.

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