Date: Sun, 05 Mar 2000 20:41:15 -0800 From: W Gerald Hicks <jhix@mindspring.com> To: Doug@gorean.org Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: empty lists in for Message-ID: <20000305204115E.jhix@mindspring.com> In-Reply-To: <38C2B805.EA899C32@gorean.org> References: <57223.952177003@axl.ops.uunet.co.za> <20000305093539F.jhix@mindspring.com> <38C2B805.EA899C32@gorean.org>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
From: Doug Barton <Doug@gorean.org> Subject: Re: empty lists in for Date: Sun, 05 Mar 2000 11:39:49 -0800 > W Gerald Hicks wrote: > > > > > > bash and ksh complain about unexpected ';'. > > > > /bin/sh (FreeBSD) thinks it's ok and does nothing. > > > > Which behaviour is more POSIXly correct? > > > > > > > > Neither bash nor ksh claim to be particularly POSIX compliant. our > > > /bin/sh does. I seem to remember POSIX being ambiguous on this one, but > > > my books are at the office. If you haven't gotten a more conclusive > > > answer by Monday, mail me and I'll look it up. > > > > I much prefer the current behavior and believe there may be many things > > which depend on it. > > Given that Bash in both standard and POSIX mode complains about 'for i > in ; do echo $i; done', I would say that it's not POSIX compatible. What > could/does depend on this behavior "working?" > Even though it's my preferred shell, I certainly wouldn't say that Bash is any sort of standard, certainly not in the POSIX sense. Imagine processing a possibly empty list constructed from a 'make' expansion... Without this behavior one would have to code a guard of some sort around the 'for' construct. If everything is checked through make release, I would hold little objection to a change *after* 4.0-RELEASE. That includes all conditional paths through make release ... -- Jerry Hicks jhix@mindspring.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20000305204115E.jhix>