[Help-bash] Interesting consequence of Bash's grammar

[Ioan-Andrei Bârsan]

Hello everyone,

I was reading through Bash's source code today and looking at its grammar
(in `parse.y') when I noticed something peculiar. The following rule caught
my eye:

function_body:    shell_command
            { $$ = $1; }

shell_command can, among other things, be the `{ ... }` group command, but
it can also be an if statement, or a while loop (see line 760). This means
that the following statement is legal Bash:

bar () if true; then echo "I am a weird funciton."; fi

Is this a known/intentional feature? Wouldn't it make more sense to define
`function_body' based on `group_command' instead of `shell_command'?

Kind regards,
Andrei