Re: Passing variables by reference conflicts with local

[Marc Herbert]

Le 04/05/2010 14:40, Eric Blake a écrit :
> Except that in computing tab completion, side effects are _all_ that
> you want - basically, Freddie's problem is how to populate the
> global completion variables from within helper functions.

Of course you want a side-effect in the caller, and my example
achieves that.  I only moved the side-effect from the callee to the
caller, from where it is spurious to where it is wanted.


> Except that it forks a subshell and consumes trailing newlines, and
> the whole point of this exercise is to avoid forks and spurious
> corruption of trailing newlines.

I fail to see the link between completion and newlines but that's
probably just because I am not interested enough. I will try to find
an alternative to eval $( )

Are you are worried about the *cost* of the subshell? How can
interactive completion be performance-sensitive?

In shell there is really not much left you can do if you forbid
yourself from forking. The whole philosophy is based on small
cooperating processes isn't it?
  http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch01s06.html
I guess this is why it still stands today after decades while kids
play with shared memory and race conditions.