Re: some variable level issues

[Eric Blake]

> 
> 1. I noticed bash variables don't support null characters (0x00). This is 
> unlike 
> perl and other languages. Will this ever change? Have people requested or 
> wanted 
> this feature?

POSIX says that the use of NUL bytes gives undefined behavior in a shell.
zsh supports this, but it would take a radical change to bash to support
it, with minimal benefit (since you cannot pass such variables on to
child processes - after all, the environ variable consists of NUL-terminated
entries).

> 3. The "+=" operator in bash seems to be slow. For instance, with my 
> benchmarks, 
> it is hundreds of times slower than ".=" in perl. Thoughts?

It's much faster than the alternative of "=".

-- 
Eric Blake