Re: Assignment of associative arrays through braces

[konsolebox]

On Wed, Aug 1, 2018 at 12:53 AM, konsolebox <konsolebox@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 31, 2018 at 10:31 PM, Chet Ramey <chet.ramey@case.edu> wrote:
>> On 7/27/18 7:13 PM, konsolebox wrote:
>>> Hi Chet,
>>>
>>> I wonder if you can allow bash to have another syntax to allow simpler
>>> declaration and/or definition of associative arrays.  The changes
>>> needed to have it done seem simple enough, and the only conflict it
>>> makes is a scalar `var={...` assignment, which in my opinion is better
>>> quoted to make it more readable and less questionable from other
>>> syntaxes like brace expansion.  I believe most people intuitively
>>> quotes it, and assignments that start with `{` is fairly rare.
>>
>> So it's syntactic sugar for `declare -gA a; a=( ... )'?
>
> That surely is one of the main goals, but it's not exact.  `declare
> -gA a; a=(...)` would always affect the main global scope.
>
> Example:
>
> $ g() { declare -gA a=([x]=y); }; f() { local -A a=(); g; declare -p
> a; }; declare -A a=([a]=b); f; declare -p a
> declare -A a=()
> declare -A a=([x]="y" )
>
> But as shown in my earlier example, a={...} would only affect the
> nearest scope which was local a={}.
>
> This proposal simply requests an intuitively equivalent simple
> assignment syntax for associative arrays just like a='...' and
> a=(...), with same behavior for scoping.
>
> Maybe we can add another option like -G to have similar effect but
> that's a little different already.  Just allowing a={} would make it
> simpler for every scripter.

By the way, is this rejected?

-- 
konsolebox