Re: unset does not act as expected on namerefs

[Greg Wooledge]

On Mon, Jun 01, 2015 at 09:59:51PM -0400, Shawn Wilson wrote:
> I'll preface this by saying I'm not an expert in bash by any
> means. However, most languages have a garbage collection facility

C does not.  Bash (all shells, really) is very strongly influenced by C.

> and most
> high level languages make it easier to make a soft or symbolic
> reference than making hard references.

Bash is not a high-level language.

> Also, whatever happens, I think there should also be a way to test
> for variable type (either another test flag or something like perl's
> ref() ).

Bash is not a strongly typed language.  You've got strings, and indexed
arrays, and associative arrays.  That's all.  (There's declare -i, but
no sane person USES that, so we can ignore it.)

You might be trying to do things that Bash is simply not designed to do.
It's a shell.