Re: [Help-bash] Why bash does not recoganize array type smartly?

[Stephane Chazelas]

2016-03-16 01:12:18 +0000, Dan Douglas:
[...]
>  $ csharp -pkg:dotnet -e '
> new[] { "foo", "bar", "baz", "bleh", "Blerg" }
>     .Select((x, num) => new KeyValuePair<string, int>(x, num))
>     .ToDictionary(x => x.Key, x => x.Value);'
> {{ "foo", 0 }, { "bar", 1 }, { "baz", 2 }, { "bleh", 3 }, { "Blerg", 4 }}
[...]

For the record, what the equivalent could be in zsh:

a=(foo bar baz bleh Blerg)
indices=({1..$#a})
typeset -A h=(${a:^indices})

With bash, you probably need a loop:

a=(foo bar baz bleh Blerg)
typeset -A h
for i in "address@hidden"; do h[${a[i]}]=$i; done

Though here, assuming I'd be needing something like that, I'd
probably go for a loop in zsh as well as that would seem more
natural to me than that zipping operator:

for i ({1..$#a}) h[$a[i]]=$i

or

n=0; for i ($a) h[$i]=$((++n))

> 
> Or the dynamic langs of course have equivalents...
> `python -c 'print(dict(enumerate(["foo", "bar", "baz", "bleh",
> "Blerg"])))'` etc.

h=(${indices:^a})

> I don't think it would be too much of a strech for ksh to add
> interfaces and iterators. It needs to clean up its type system a bit
> and expose more of the shell's functionality through it.
> 
> Bash could do the same with some extra syntax to represent glib
> collections it could do a lot without having to re-invent the wheel.

The zipping operator ${array1:^array2} is relatively recent in
zsh.

It may reinvent the wheel, but here it's a wheel fitted to doing
day to day admin tasks efficiently at a shell prompt while the
C#/python/glib you refer to are more programming languages.

-- 
Stephane