Re: manpage error-Arithmetic Evaluation of numbers with explicit base

[Marc Herbert]

Le 29/03/2010 14:50, Thomas Bartosik a écrit :

> Please don't get me wrong. I have no problem in understanding the
>  man page this way, but I do think it is inconsistent.

It's a pity that square brackets are used both in the language itself
and in its syntactic definitions but this is bound to happen when
there is a fairly limited number of characters available.

So what do you suggest? Removing brackets from POSIX is going to be
quite challenging. Getting rid of them in syntactic definitions is
probably even less realistic considering how they are universally used
to describe optional elements (even in EBNF).

So I do not think you can do any better than trying to make sure the
context makes things obvious enough on a case by case basis. What are
your suggestions to make the Arithmetic Evaluation page more obvious?

By the way I do not think the Bash manual is meant for newbies. It is
a reference manual and there are tons and tons of other, free
resources better suited to newbies.


Cheers,

Marc