Re: gettext feature request

[Jean-Jacques Brucker]

Le 12/08/2021 à 16:29, Chet Ramey a écrit :
> On 8/11/21 6:35 PM, Jean-Jacques Brucker wrote:
> > Thank a lot Chet.
> >
> > I still think it would have been more consistent to extend the $'...' syntax.
> Why would it be more consistent to add translation to a quoting syntax that
> didn't have it than to post-process translations in a different way?
>
> Chet


I'm probably less familiar with the history of shells and bash than you (and

others on this mailing list), but it seems to me that:

First were the chains:
 * '...' who did not expand anything
 * "..." which expanded the syntaxes $VAR and the unfortunate `...` [1]

Then the syntax $"..." was introduced, then the syntax $'...' (bash 2.X).

As the character '$' means "interprets (synonym: translates) what 
follows", it
seems to me quite consistent that $"..." means "translates the entire 
following
string"

Conversely, the syntax $'...' seems to me much less consistent. 
(Reminder: C is
prior to shells, and bash is itself written in C).

However, the "C-string" feature is very useful (and nowadays probably 
more used
than the translation feature).

In absolute terms, if one day we would list all the historical design 
errors,
dare to break some compatibilities, and manage to establish new shell 
standards
(I'm probably dreaming ... but do we ever know ?). Then we could have:

 1. "...": expanded shell string
 2. '...': unexpanded shell string
 3. `...`: unexpanded C string (today $'...' :-/ )

and logically:

 4. $"...": translated expanded shell string (to NOT use for security 
reasons)
 5. $'...': translated unexpanded shell string (soon released $"..." with
    shopt noexpand_translation !?)
 6. $`...`: translated unexpanded C string (the feature[2] I dream of the
    most, maybe soon $'...' with a shopt like translate_c_string ?)

[1]: cf. https://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Sh.html#uh-8a

[2]: What I like the most about this feature, and that I could directly 
reuse
existing translation chains. Not only to dig into the many existing C
translations, but also not to redo the translations when, for various 
reasons
(performance, etc.), we are forced to rewrite bash code in a compiled 
language.

OpenPGP_signature
Description: OpenPGP digital signature