On Wed, 20 Aug 2025 at 00:15, Chet Ramey <chet.ra...@case.edu> wrote:
> No different than evaluating a variable value in an expression as an > expression. > In other languages, binding and assignment are clearly different operations, where this would clearly NOT be "no different". (Such malapropisms are, sadly, an oft recurring theme in the design of the shell language; *sigh*.) > I would rather that assignment modifier flags (-i, -l, -u, -r} simply be > > ignored when binding. > > I'm sure you would, but that's neither backwards compatible nor compatible > with other shells (ksh93, mksh, even zsh) that impletment declare/typeset. In respect of -l, -u and -r, that's fair comment, so let's set those aside and focus on binding with -i, where the old behaviour was to fail silently. Ignoring -i when binding (only applying it when assigning) would seem like a reasonable backwards-compatible extension, but can anyone think of a circumstance where failing to leave the name unbound, and/or failing to return a non-zero exit status, could conceivably break something useful? -Martin
