On Sat, Apr 26, 2008 at 04:05:48PM +0100, Clint Adams wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 26, 2008 at 12:00:03PM +0100, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > On a french keyboard, '|' is typed by using alt-gr, and the non-breaking
> > space is often typed by using alt-gr space. That often leads to this:
> >
> > € echo a | grep a
> > zsh: command not found: grep
> >
> > Because zsh looks for a " grep" command, with leading non-breaking space
> > because my thumb remained a bit too long on the alt-gr key.
> >
> > This doesn't happen with bash, because bash treats non-breaking space as
> > a word separator. Could zsh do the same? (currently, I have defined
> > alias grep=grep
> > alias vi=vi
> > ...)
>
> Having locale-based (and multibyte) word separators sounds like a nightmare
> to me, but maybe someone has some ideas.
Having the shell syntax that depends on the environment looks
like a very bad idea to me (think of scripts!).
There are already problems like that such as
case $x in
([a-z]) ...;;
esac
which is locale dependent while in most cases it's not what you
want. And to work around that is a nightmare POSIXly like:
LC_ALL=C command eval 'case $x in ([a-z]) ... esac'
(which doesn't even work in some shells because of bugs).
Another bad example which is causing more harm than benefit:
in ksh93, the decimal point is locale dependent, so you can't
do:
float Pi=3.14159265359
which is a syntax error is some locales:
$ LC_ALL=fr_FR ksh93 -c 'float Pi=3.141592653589'
ksh93[1]: typeset: 3.141592653589: arithmetic syntax error
This one is even harder to overcome:
$ LC_ALL=fr_FR ksh93 -c '
LC_ALL=C command float Pi=3.141592653589; print $Pi'
$ LC_ALL=fr_FR ksh93 -c 'LC_ALL=C command eval float Pi=3.141592653589
print $((Pi))'
ksh93: line 2: 3.141592653589: arithmetic syntax error
LC_ALL=fr_FR ksh93 -c 'in_C_locale() { typeset LC_ALL=C; eval "$@"; }
in_C_locale float Pi=3.141592653589; echo $LC_ALL; print $((Pi))'
C
3.141592653589
All of which look like bugs to me.
Anyway, my point was to say that it's a bad idea to have the
syntax of the shell dependant on the locale.
--
Stéphane
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