Re: Officially document that we allow other characters in function names

[Chet Ramey]

On 6/27/16 1:15 PM, Pierre Gaston wrote:
> 
> 
> On Mon, Jun 27, 2016 at 7:17 PM, konsolebox <konsolebox@gmail.com
> <mailto:konsolebox@gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     On Mon, Jun 27, 2016 at 10:41 PM, Chet Ramey <chet.ramey@case.edu
>     <mailto:chet.ramey@case.edu>> wrote:
>     > On 6/27/16 3:11 AM, konsolebox wrote:
>     >> Hi, I think it's time that we officially specify in the manual of Bash
>     >> that we allow other characters besides [[:alnum:]_] when declaring
>     >> function names in non-POSIX mode.
>     >
>     > Is there some new reason to do this now?
>     >
> 
>     Not really, but sometimes I encounter people saying such practice of
>     using characters besides those allowed by POSIX is wrong simply
>     because it is undocumented.  I just thought about making a suggestion
>     today, and hope that it gets updated before 4.4.
> 
>     --
>     konsolebox
> 
> Chet is one of these people ;)
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-bash/2011-04/msg00040.html

Not wrong because it's undocumented.  At the time, I said it was a bad idea
because it didn't integrate well with other parts of the shell (like unset)
that require valid identifiers as arguments.  I'm not going to remove the
feature.


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