Re: RFC: major change to argument processing.

[Dirk Herrmann]

On Fri, 1 Jun 2001, Lars J. Aas wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 01, 2001 at 11:56:52AM +0200, Dirk Herrmann wrote:
> : On 1 Jun 2001, Marius Vollmer wrote:
> : > Single quotes in sh do not do any `\' processing between them.
> : 
> : Well, I am still not sure it is worth the additional effort to emulate
> : shell behaviour... :-|
> 
> It's a more widespread concept than just shells - e.g. perl does it the
> same way.  People will burn themselves on this, expecting single quotes
> to leave backslashes alone.

True, but the point here is, that we are adding functionality for a very
limited (IMO) use, namely for adding code between the #! ... !# in a
script.  The question was raised before, whether it would not make sense
to put complicated extensions into the script itself instead of doing them
within the #! ... !# header.  Further, the "/' magic, which is completely
un-schemey, is mostly helpfull in order to deal with backslash and quoting
characters in program arguments.

Is it really worth the effort, to write a dedicated parser for the
#! ... !# stuff if its application can be expected to be rarely used and
if the complicatedness is then only for making people use backslashes and
double quote characters more comfortably?  Compared to using (read), and
checking the result to be a string, this seems simply to be overkill for
me.

Best regards,
Dirk Herrmann