Re: RFE: request for quotes as grouping operators to work in brackets as elsewhere.

[Linda Walsh]

Pierre Gaston wrote:

> Just quote the spaces and not the special chars:

Pierre, your suggestion doesn't help clean up strings used inside of double
brackets.  I wanted to avoid the need for multiple backslashes in an expression 
as it makes the expression less readable and more error prone.

> Note that the same problem and solution exist when you use filename generation:
>
> for f in /some path/ withspaces/*; do  # doesn't work the path contains spaces
----
        I'm aware of that, but since [[ and ]] are new, and =~ is new, there
is no legal interpretation for multiple arguments on either side of the =~
operator.

Since =~ permits comparing variables _without_ putting quotes around them,
(as would normally be the case if you used the single square brackets and
plain '='), why not extend that idea to not needing quotes between
the =~ and either side of the double square brackets so literal strings 
benefit from not needing quotes as well.

Of course, if quotes *are* included on the rhs, then the pattern matching
(glob or regex) would be disabled as happens now.

Is there a downside to this syntax or this idea?