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Re: declare a="$b" if $a previously set as array


From: Stephane Chazelas
Subject: Re: declare a="$b" if $a previously set as array
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2014 10:43:45 +0000
User-agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15)

2014-12-10 06:33:00 +0800, konsolebox:
[...]
> > Not sure what you mean by that last sentence, but all of dash,
> > yash, mksh, pdksh, AT&T ksh, posh, zsh (so virtually all modern
> > Bourne-like shells) do support local scopes each with variations
> > of behaviour and syntax.
> 
> I know ksh, pdksh and zsh supports local but I didn't know that dash
> does it too - or maybe I forgot.  I always remember that it's a pure
> POSIX shell but apparently it's not.

dash (and posh) follow (or at least used to) another standard,
the Debian policy which is more or less POSIX with a few
additions (from XSI, UP and its owns).

In particular, it mandates a "local" builtin. So sh scripts that
use "local" are guaranteed to work in Debian. However note that
behaviour for "local foo=bar" is unspecified there, so sh
scripts for Debian should use "local foo; foo=bar" (even those
POSIX specifies "export foo=bar" (though not clearly enough)).
Last time I checked, the Debian spec didn't specify the exact
variable scoping (for instance whether dynamic รก la
ksh88/bash/dash/yash/pdksh or lexical a la ksh93).

There have been discussions on specifying local scopes in the
past, but it's hard to get a consensus. See the discussion at
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.standards.posix.austin.general/8371/focus=8377

David Korn mentions that local scoping a la ksh was originally
rejected by POSIX because ksh88 originally implemented "dynamic
scoping" (like most shells now do, but most other languages
don't). ksh changed to lexical scoping in ksh93 (probably partly
to address that POSIX /requirement/) and now everyone else wants
dynamic scoping because that's how most shells have implemented
it in the interval.

> And sorry I actually meant
> "some other".  Consider a more conservative shell like heirloom-sh.
[...]

Note that that's the Bourne shell, not a POSIX sh.

It's ironic that local scoping is now implemented in virtually
all POSIX shells but not specified by POSIX.

-- 
Stephane



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