Re: How do we get state of a flag in set -o ...

[Chet Ramey]

On 7/11/23 6:11 PM, Kerin Millar wrote:

> It is even true of variable expansion.
>
> $ declare -A map; str="two words"; map=( $str ); declare -p map
> declare -A map=(["two words"]="" )
>
> It seems like a bug to me. It's certainly counter-intuitive. For indexed 
> arrays, word splitting occurs. I see no particular reason for associative 
> arrays to be a special case.

You have it backwards. Word splitting doesn't happen on the rhs of an
assignment statement. It happens for indexed arrays in this particular
case because I did it for ksh compatibility (because the behavior of a list
of words in a compound assignment to an indexed array was well-defined), so
indexed arrays are the exception. Note that it doesn't take place for
assignment words in a compound array assignment, making it even more of a
special case.

Now that key-value pairs in compound assignments to associative arrays
are well-defined, it might make sense to extend the associative array
compound assignments to perform word splitting, but that's not backwards
compatible, and the whole idea of key-value assignments is to mimic
the semantics of ( [key]=value ... ).

--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/