[Octave-bug-tracker] [bug #56809] Dots in script file names should be allowed

[Michael Leitner]

Follow-up Comment #7, bug #56809 (project octave):

You see, I am not familiar with all peculiarities of octave's syntax, much
less with the mechanisms how they are enforced. And if octave's syntax was
drawn up from scratch (and no matlab precedent existed) and somebody asked me,
I probably would vote against having the possibility of running scripts by
just typing the script's filename excluding the suffix at the command line at
all. After all, python and R shells are doing fine with the equivalents of
source(...), which also in the present case would have no problems with dots,
spaces or equalities. 

It's just that on the one hand the possibility does exist and is arguably the
standard way of running scripts used by people, and on the other hand it would
be nice if dots were allowed in script file names (I don't care about spaces).
And that it seemed to me that the concept of script files is recognized at an
unnecessarily deep level in the present implementation (see the reported error
for script(1) or script+1). It still seems to me that after splitting any
entered command at the semicolons, a script name has always to appear in
isolation. This would have allowed to distinguish the parsing into the first
case "it is potentially a complex expression, but no script names appear"
(including your case of "foo bar"), failing which the second case "it is a
single script file name without any arguments or operands" would be tried, in
which case the dot would not have a special meaning any more. Am I wrong
here?



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