Re: Conditional append operator (was: Re: New conditional assignment facility)

[Jouke Witteveen]

On Sun, Feb 4, 2024 at 12:05 AM Paul Smith <psmith@gnu.org> wrote:
>
> On Sat, 2024-02-03 at 17:45 -0500, Paul Smith wrote:
> > Here's how I think the "append changes the type of the variable"
> > option works:
>
...
>
> Sorry for the possible confusion.
>

I feel these proposals are
1) not obvious in how they work, regardless of how they work, and
2) largely possible without new syntax.

The first of these is proven by the amount of communication so far.
The second is true except for maybe leaking some helper variables.

For the original ?= these two points did not hold. When you understand
what kind of problem it solves, it is fairly clear that it does so in
a very reasonable way.

What about adding only ?:= and !:= and forgetting about appending? The
semantics of these two operators should be so obvious that I don't
even need to explain them. They are also not really possible with the
current operators (the $(shell) function is not an operator).

Regards,
- Jouke